Category Archives: Uncategorized

November 25, 2015 · 2:08 am

Holidays Galore for the ESL/EFL and Counseling Worlds!

Happy November!  In this post, we have tons of holiday resources and ideas to share for your ESL/EFL classroom or counseling office.  Also, a quick update- that we will be signing off here for a few months to focus on getting all the teaching and counseling guides below written.  As always, you can click on any of the bolded links below for a free resource.

 

 

BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES

  • As mentioned above, we won’t be posted our regular monthly blogs in the near future in order to free up time to publish all the teaching and counseling guides listed below.  Instead, we will post mini-blog posts here as we come across some resource or info that we just have to share with you.  And, as always, you can follow us on our Bilingual Learner FB page to get real time updates of resources, info, and free downloadables.
  • Here are our latest guides coming at you very soon:

 

 

HOLIDAY ESL/EFL RESOURCES

 

HOLIDAY COUNSELING RESOURCES

That brings us to the end of this month’s post.  If you haven’t done so already, like us at one our Facebook page below to become one of our Bilingual Learner followers where you will have access to real time updates of our latest info, resources, and all our other free downloadables!    As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.

 

Wait!! Did you find this post helpful? Then…One sentence!  That’s all it takes to show that our hard work helped you out! If you found a resource here, please show us your love and comment about it below!

 

 

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November 25, 2015 · 2:04 am

New Kids on the Block: Tips for the Rookie Counselor or ESL/EFL Teacher

If you are new to the school environment, the start of the school year is about as overwhelming as it gets!  So our September post is full of tips for helping the rookie counselor or teacher survive and thrive during your first (or fifth) year.  Someone once said that the first year of teaching is just survival…. 

BUT FIRST A FEW BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES:

  • Our newest guide, Get Your Goal On: Academic Achievement Group Counseling Guide is here! Order it or download a free preview to motivate your underachieving students to pass those classes! Check it out @ http://bilinguallearner.com/Products.
  • We also just put up our other counseling guide, The Unstressables: Stress Management Group Counseling Guide, on our website.  Check out the free downloadable preview on our homepage @ http://bilinguallearner.com/.
  • Finally, our latest ESL/EFL lessons guide, ESL in the Middle Volume One, is available with lots of lesson plans for your intermediate English learner.  We hope to start cranking out Volume Two after the December holidays!

 

TIPS FOR NEW COUNSELORS AND NEW TEACHERS

The first year of counseling is like the first year of teaching- SURVIVAL!  So our first tip for you is our most simple and most important:

  • Just do your best and go with the flow- you really do need that first full year of school counseling or teaching under your belt before you can have a true understanding of what your job entails.  Unfortunately, you can’t get to that understanding until to make it through your first year.  The learning curve is incredibly steep, so as long as your show up everyday, keep a running list of upgrades for your program the following year, and do your best to help kids, you are a shining star!  Which leads us to our next tip…
  • Start a “Things to Do/Modify for Next Year” list right away where you can jot down any ideas or modifications for things you’d like to implement differently the following year.  It is so crucial to jot down your ideas in the moment right as they strike you- trust us, you’ll never remember it all if you wait until the end of the year to make your list.
  • Say the serenity prayer or some other form of it often.  Working in schools is truly an experience where you will always see much more need than you can meet.  In addition, you will see things that need to change, but are out of your control.  Just remember to stay positive and change the things you can, accept the things you cannot, and try to know the difference.

 

TIPS FOR NEW COUNSELORS ONLY

  • Get a copy of your state’s counselor manual (here’s a link to an example- it’s our Texas one) and make it your Bible- everything you do in your day should somehow relate back to the duties in that manual.
  • Join ASCA and make time to read their monthly magazine.
  • Meet with your administration (especially your principal or director) and fill out and sign a school counseling annual agreement for planning your program.  Here’s a link to ASCA’s template for an Annual Agreement.
  • Find out your district’s protocol for handling student crisis (3 hurts) situations and be ready and well-versed in how to follow it.  If you are in a district or school that doesn’t have a protocol for this, use ours by following this link.
  • If you are transitioning from being a teacher to being a school counselor (as we did), keep in mind that you are no longer part of the teacher team and this may sting.  Some teachers think that no one works as hard as they do and some can be forgetful or unwelcoming to non-teaching staff.  If this is your campus reality, just hang in there and be friendly- sooner or later you’ll make some close ties with the other non-teaching staff (at my school, we call ourselves the No-team Team) and you’ll eventually find some teachers that will be thrilled to have you on their “team.”

 

TIPS FOR NEW TEACHERS ONLY

We also had an equally long list of additional tips for new ESL/EFL teachers, but then we realized… why post our tips when the experts say it so much better!  So here some links to the best new teacher tips we found among the top educational organizations.

 

AND NOW A FEW PICS OF OUR 2015-16 SCHOOL SPACES:

 

 

 

 

 

 

That brings us to the end of this month’s post.  We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on being a new teacher or counselor (we were all there once!), so comment below!  Catch up with us again the first Saturday in October for our next post on substance abuse prevention in the classroom and Red Ribbon Week activities.  As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.

 

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July 7, 2015 · 2:34 am

Summer Resources

Happy Independence Day to all you Americans out there!  Enjoy this little blast-from-the-past video clip in honor of the 4th of July (click on the telescope pic to the left)…

Well, better late than never!  We finally have our July post up and ready for you, just before midnight!  This month, we are full of ideas and tips on getting prepared for the next school year!  So if you’d like some professional food-for-thought to make your program even better once you start up again, this post is right up your alley!  As always, we’ve included a lot of helpful resources- just click on the bolded links that are underlined which will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use after you leave a comment below.But, first, a few Bilingual Learner updates…

BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES

And now, onto our main feature:

5 TIPS TO PREPARE YOUR ESL/EFL CLASSROOM OR COUNSELING OFFICE FOR THE NEXT SCHOOL YEAR

1.  Avoid Burnout-Unless you MUST be in your office or classroom during your break, STAY AWAY!  We know… this can be really hard. There’s just something so tempting about the potential to get work done in the quiet and solitary environment of your own empty classroom/office.  But, it is important to stay away in order to recharge yourself so you can start fresh when you do have to return.  Think of it this way- batteries don’t recharge themselves while still in the flashlight.

2.  Make a List– Start writing down any changes and additions you would like to make in your teaching or counseling program on a “Things to Change Next Year” list.  Anytime you have a revelation about something that might work better for you and your students/clients, write it on the list.   Then at the end of your break, spend some time transferring the changes you most want to implement into your planner, smartphone, master counseling calendar (here’s ours if you need a template), Outlook calendar, or whatever you use to organize and plan out your year.  Here’s a link to a snippet of our “Things to Change Next Year” list.

3.  Compile Your Supplies– Staples makes a lot of money off of us over the summer.  They may not see us during the entire school year except for an occasional frantic weeknight run, but we are on a first-name basis over the summer!  Spend some time writing out a list of all the supplies you would like to buy and then shop for them during your break when you have the time to concentrate, take your time, and enjoy your shopping experience.  Here’s our shopping list (and a pic!) so far:

  • 2015-16 Academic Planner
  • First-day-of-school outfit (We buy ourselves a new one every year to feel a little extra sparkly on that first day when we throw open the doors!)
  • Stickers
  • Prizes for the treasure chest
  • index cards
  • CD labels
  • padded envelopes

4.  Do Your PD (Professional Development) Reading– If you are into this sort of thing, use your break to read, highlight, and take notes on whatever it is you want to improve on in your career.  After reading, review your notes, and red star the 5-10 most important ones and then put them in your “Things to Change Next Year” list. Here’s a PD reading list to start with if you need some ideas:

ESL/EFL BOOKS

COUNSELING BOOKS

6. Student/Client List– Make a list of those students or clients who you didn’t quite finish your work with last year; include a note about where you left off with them and what more you can do to support them.  Spend some time checking in with them in the beginning of the year to help them get started on the right foot.  Often just knowing that someone cares and is available is all the support they need.

7.  Plan it Out of the Way! Plan as many of your lessons, units, group sessions, and/or guidance lessons as you can.  As mentioned above, the beginning of the school year tsunami is coming and the less you have to do when it hits, the better you will feel!

8. Decorate- Stop doing #1 and return two to three days before your actual official start date to decorate your office or classroom.  Even, better, do it before you leave on break, if you still have that option. Decorating your classroom or office is one of the few things you can do without students, clients, or work systems in place.  All you need is some butcher paper, a stapler, staples and StaplesTM, Pinterest, and your own creativity.  So, knock out this fun and crucial task before the beginning-of-school-year tsunami hits!  Here are a few photos of our decorations below:

COUNSELING OFFICE

          
          

ESL CLASSROOM

    

That brings us to the end of this month’s post.  Catch up with us again the first Saturday in August for our next post on the adventures of the first month back to counseling and teaching!   As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.

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June 13, 2015 · 2:08 am

ESL/EFL SUMMER RESOURCES PLUS IDENTITY & SUICIDE SUPPORT

May 2, 2015

We have lots of interesting tidbits to share today so let’s just jump right into it!  Our post today will feature some of the latest resources we’ve come across this spring in the ESL/EFL and counseling worlds…summer English activities,Memorial Day lessons and other cultural resources,suicide prevention, and LGBT awareness.  More on all this in a bit, but first, let’s start with some updates.

As always, we’ve included a lot of helpful resources- just click on the bold links which will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use after you leave a comment below.

BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES

  • Get ready for our latest counseling guides, Stress Blasters and Get Your Goal On!  These 2 books on antianxiety techniques and academic achievement strategies are starting production as soon as we begin our summer break in June.  Look for updates, free preview downloadables, and ordering details on our website or FB page below!
  • Our Spring eblast is coming!  If you aren’t already on our enewsletter mailing list, sign up by filling out the form on this webpage to the right.  Then, we can send our newsletter filled with free counseling/ESL/EFL resources right to your inbox!
  • We are continuing to churn out our newest teaching guide, ESL in the Middle: Lessons Guide for Teaching Intermediate Students.  A sneak peek and freebie downloadable from this intermediate ESL/EFL teaching guide is now available on the left side of our homepage!

ESL/EFL MEMORIAL DAY & SUMMER ACTIVITIES… PLUS CULTURE RESOURCES!

As happens every year in May, schools are gearing up to work with Newcomer students over the summer to give them that extra push into language that will help propel them along for the next school year.  In researching some of our own summer-themed ESL/EFL activities for the latest guide we are writing, ESL in the Middle, we’ve found and created some fun and free summer-themed ESL/EFL activities below that you can use with your ELL or Newcomer students.  In addition, we came across the most amazing set of maps of the English-speaking world and culture.  Plus, the map explanations sum up our reasoning behind writing the Bilingual Learner Culture Explorerguides where students can learn about and experience various aspects of the “English-speaking culture.”

COUNSELING: SUICIDE PREVENTION RESOURCES AND LGBT AWARENESS

A sad but very frequent reality that counselors have to deal with is suicide prevention.  Suicidal Ideation (thinking about, considering, or planning for suicide) is something every counselor will come into contact with as they treat their students/clients.  For that reason, we’d like to include some of the best resources we’ve come across that will help you reach out to your kids who are battling this monster.

And finally, we’d like to wrap up with a few words about and resources for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) movement that is really gaining momentum in reaching out to young people and providing a safe place for countless numbers of youngsters struggling with their own gender identity.

That brings us to the end of this month’s post.  Catch up with us again the first Saturday in June for our next post on ending your counseling sessions and wrapping up your ESL/EFL classroom for summer break.  As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL/EFL adventures by following us on ourFacebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.

Wait!! Did you find this post helpful? Then…One sentence!  That’s all it takes to show that our hard work helped you out! If you found a great resource here, please show us your love and comment about it below!

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June 13, 2015 · 1:56 am

ESL & Counseling Tips for the End of the School Year

Hello Summer Vacay!  Oh, it’s that glorious time of the year when US teachers and school counselors throw their hands up in the air in FREEDOM!  Sorry to all you overseas educators who are still slugging away at your schools, but we’ll be envying you big time come December and January…

So, our June post is a shorter one because we have just sent out our quarterly newsletter with 19 different downloadable resources that we’d normally put in this post.  So, sign up to the right asap if you haven’t already received our latest newsletter.  However, in the spirit of our monthly post, we do have some updates and freebies for you.  Read on below and, as always…we’ve included a lot of helpful resources- just click on the bold links which will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use after you leave a comment below.

BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES

  • Look for our new beginners ESL guide, ESL Express, later this summer.  It will be a streamlined version of ESL for Beginners that is organized into 4 weekly units.
  • We just sent our latest ESL teaching guide, ESL in the Middle: Lessons Guide for Teaching Intermediate Students to our editor!  As soon as Anne works her editing magic, we will have it up on the website for order.  A sneak peek and freebie downloadable from this intermediate ESL/EFL teaching guide is now available on the left side of our homepage!
  • The Spanish version of Girl World: Girl Empowerment Group Counseling Guide, Charla Entre Chicas, is FINALLY ready for publication.  Look for it on ourproducts page in the next few weeks.
  • A huge shoutout to the newest member of the Bilingual Learner team, Monica Briancon, our amazing Spanish editor who we had to go all the way to Bolivia to find!  We’ve been searching for her for 2 years, but she is definitely worth the wait!
  • Get ready for our latest counseling guides, Stress Blasters and Get Your Goal On! These 2 books on anti-anxiety techniques and academic achievement strategies are starting production this week!!  We are super excited and can’t wait to get going on them!  Look for updates, free preview downloadables, and ordering details on our website or FB page below.
  • Another huge shoutout to our fabulously talented illustrator, Michell Schalik, for the new Be Cool: Anger Management Group Counseling Guide illustrations that will go into our revised guide later this summer.  The pics are wonderful and a sneak peak is above.
  • FYI- we provide free revised editions of all our Bilingual Learner guides to all our customers who request them.  You can find out when we publish a revised guide by subscribing to our newsletter because we advertise updated editions of our books there.  Once you hear of a revised guide, just email us at bilinguallearner@hotmail.com with your name, the name of the guide, the date you purchased it, and where you purchased it from (our website, TPT, Amazon, etc) and we will get an electronic version of your revised guide emailed right out to you!

END-OF-YEAR ESL/EFL TIPS

If you are ending your ESL classes for the school year, consider these tips:

  • Keep students engaged in meaningful lessons until the last day of class.  Although the temptation is strong to start showing videos and letting students play games, this will only frustrate you as class time crawls and everyone wastes their time (or worse-misbehavior starts).  Consider incorporating meaningful lesson content into fun activities such as field trips or art projects.  And in case you haven’t yet taught contractions… Click on this freebie contractions chart to have some meaningful content to incorporate into your fun end-of-the-year activities!
  • Give students a reading list of favorite, easy reader English chapter books that they can enjoy over the summer in order to keep their English fresh.
  • During lunch or off-times, enlist your students to help you pack up your classroom.  Spend an afternoon organizing various jobs for various students, give them a 30 minute training session and let them go!  While your student movers are working, you can use this time to research some dynamic lessons and units for next year!

ENDING YOUR COUNSELING SESSIONS

But first, a fun freebie for working with those academic underachievers:  The No Zeroes Race! Do you have students who struggle with passing their classes?  We do and as part of our academic achievement group counseling curriculum, we play The No Zeroes Race with our group members.  For the racetrack and directions, click here!

If you are in the counseling profession, this time of year brings lots of closure.  We wrap up guidance lessons and terminate individual/group sessions as students leave on summer trips or move away.  So, for this post, Bilingual Learner has included a few downloadables to help you with ending your sessions and lessons.  We think there are many different ways to effectively wrap up your counseling sessions, but all should include discussions throughout counseling of when the final session will be and also discussion about how to make future contact with the counselor, if needed.   For all our groups and individual sessions we run, we have students fill out an evaluation during the last session to show us what they have learned, how they have grown, and ways we might improve our sessions for the future-here is the evaluation from our counseling guide, Be Cool! – it is the group evaluation from this guide, but can easily be modified for use with individuals, too.  We use anonymous quotes from the session evaluations in our data presentations to school stakeholders to show them the power and effectiveness of counseling- you can see an example of this from the preview of ourGirl World Group Counseling Sessions Guide coming out this summer.  If you would like to see the rest of our group and guidance lesson data tools, just click the “Group and Guidance Lessons Tools” icon link on our homepage.   Alternately, for school-wide counseling programs, we have every student on campus complete this evaluation of our program and the lessons we have taught.  We also plot all the data collected in our student program evaluations on excel charts/graphs and present them as well to the school leadership team.  While all of these forms work primarily as evaluation tools, we also use them as a sort of needs assessment for future lessons and counseling sessions since we work with many of the same students from year to year.

That brings us to the end of this month’s post.  Catch up with us again the first Saturday in July for our next MYSTERY post.   As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.

Wait!! Did you find this post helpful? Then…One sentence!  That’s all it takes to show that our hard work helped you out! If you found a resource here, please show us your love and comment about it below!

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December 9, 2014 · 8:45 am

Classroom Management & Holiday Goodies, Galore!

Happy Holidays to All!

In this post, we’d like to give you lots of fun, festive, holiday freebies AND give you our thoughts on the basics of classroom management- both as it relates to counselors and teachers.  You can access the freebies by leaving a comment with the number of your choice (see red details below) and then clicking on the underlined links, so we can get you access to our Goog Doc resources.  Let’s begin with the holiday goodies…

HOLIDAY FREEBIES & RESOURCES

Free Book Holiday Giveaway!  We are so thankful for our Bilingual Learner readers so we’d like to give you a little gift of thanks for all you do for your students and clients! For the month of December, when you order any product off our website @ http://bilinguallearner.com/Products, we will send you another eproduct (PDF version) of your choice for FREE! Just be sure to send us a quick email after you make your Bilingual Learner order through Paypal on our website and tell us what second product you’d like us to send you for free and then we will happily send both products right to your inbox. We appreciate YOU!

With “newcomer” students who are brand new to the USA, we love to do a mini-unit on the different winter holidays celebrated in the US and around the world.  This holiday mini unit is part of our Cultural Explorers group (where we just finished the Thanksgiving in America booklet that was mentioned in the last blog post below).  In our holiday mini-unit, we first ask students what they know about popular winter holidays celebrated in the US and then we hand out this ESL/EFL Winter Holidays booklet.  We round robin read the packet with students, having them fill in the holidays in the blanks as we read along.  It’s best to have a holiday word bank displayed for students to use as they copy the holiday words into their packets.  Once we are done reading/filling in the packet, students can then illustrate each holiday in their packet.  The following session, we have a  Winter Holiday FUNquiz where students can test their knowledge of the packet info and win a prize.   This winter holiday activity will be part of our next book in the Culture Explorers series, whenever we find some time to crank that one out!  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter (links at bottom of post) to get real time alerts of when our next Culture Explorers book, as well as other BL products, are available!

Here are some seasonal counseling resources that we’ve come across:

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Classroom management is such a major aspect of effective teaching and learning.  The type of classroom management a teacher has will set their classroom tone and make or break student learning.  So, in all our work with student teachers and interns over the years, here’s a list of the major tips we give on classroom management.

If you are a counselor, classroom management is an important part of your guidance or counseling lessons even if you are teaching them in another teacher’s classroom.  When Counselor Stephanie first started out as a rookie school counselor back in 2008, she (feeling a little too confident about her classroom management as a teacher) thought she’d alleviate some teacher work load, and tell them they didn’t need to stick around to discipline during her guidance lessons.  Mistake!  Big. Mistake.  She realized pretty quickly that while the kids followed her rules and accepted her consequences for misbehavior, they lost sight of how she could support them.  Her (inappropriate) role as disciplinarian, even in a short monthly 30 min lesson, seriously compromised they way the students interacted with her as a counselor.  In short, they weren’t always comfortable coming to her for counseling help because they saw her as their disciplinarian, not as the non-judgmental, always-on-their-side school counselor.  Hmmmm….

Here are some fun and super informative classroom management resources that will round out any teacher’s or counselor’s toolbox…

In conclusion, we are signing off for the holidays.  We have lots of ESL/counseling products that we want to finish, start, and bury ourselves in, so we will take a little hiatus from our monthly posts until late January.  In the meantime, we’ll leave you with some food-for-thought in the form of these great resources below:

 

BUT, ONE LAST THING!  We want your opinion! Take our poll by writing the number of the Bilingual Learner book you’d be most interested in using, in the comments area below:
1. The School Counselor’s Handbook 
2. Anti Anxiety/Stress Reduction Group Counseling Guide
3. Academic Success Group Counseling Guide
4. Teach Intermediate English to Your Students
5. Teach Yourself English
6. ESL/EFL Grammar Structures and Songs Book

 

So, that’s it from us until we see ya on the flip side.  Check back with us the first Saturday in February for our post on classroom management! Remember, you can access the freebies by leaving a comment with the number of your choice (see red details above) and then clicking on the underlined links, so we can get you access to our Goog Doc resources.  You can also find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.

 

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November 1, 2014 · 4:05 pm

ESL and Counseling During Thanksgiving

Happy November!

Our BL post today will be a shorter one because we are busy cranking out our Fall Eblast, which (if you are on our mailing list) will hit your inbox in the next week or so!  Look for all of the fab resources and freebies we’ve been saving up for you these last few months, plus a promotional giveaway for a free book!  If you haven’t already put yourself on our newsletter mailing list, you can do so now by sending us an email with YES TO NEWSLETTER in the subject line to bilinguallearner@hotmail.com.

If you reside stateside (or maybe even if you don’t), it’s getting close to that festive time of year….Thanksgiving!  We’ve been having a blast this week, gearing up to work with our “newcomer” group of students on our BL Thanksgiving activity.  As always, we’ve included a lot of helpful resources- just click on the links which will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use after you leave a comment below.  As we’ve mentioned before, we run 2 weekly ESL Survival Skills groups for students who have just arrived this year to the US from another country.  The purpose of these groups is to help students learn about and transition to the US culture.  Every week, Counselor Stephanie has so many endearing stories about working with these group members; this past week, she was reading Amada Irma Perez’ wonderful autobiographical picture book, My Diary from Here to There/Mi Diario de Aqui hasta Alla, to the group members, when she looked up and noticed 3 of them crying as they listened to the story of Amada having to say goodbye to her father as a young girl.  Oh, the emotions and experiences these newbies struggle with!   On a lighter note, next week we will start our Thanksgiving activity,  “Thanksgiving Booklet & Funquiz,”  with these groups.   The booklet and funquiz introduce students to this important American holiday, while strengthening English vocabulary and listening comprehension.  Knowledge of major holidays is such an important part of feeling comfortable and accepted within a culture.  It is a great way for “newcomers” to gain understanding of that culture.  Moreover, this is something all young nationals get as they go through the school system in their own culture, but our “newcomers” often miss out on this important cultural knowledge when they transition in after all the fun grade school holiday instruction is finished.   So, the Thanksgiving activity is a fantastic blend of both counseling and ESL/EFL/bilingual support!  This booklet and fun quiz is included in our ESL Survival Skills Guide on the Products Page of our website.  We’ve also included a few freebie clips from this Thanksgiving booklet for your downloading pleasure: Thanksgiving in America and El Dia de Gracias.  Additionally, if you want a guide that exposes students to the English-speaking culture, but not necessarily the US culture, check out our  Culture Explorers Guide.

Here are some of our favorite Thanksgiving activities that you also might want to use with your students/clients…

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Pumpkin Ball

November Read Alouds

November Books for Guidance/Counseling Lessons

Free Thanksgiving Worksheets

Teaching a Thanksgiving Lesson Outside of the USA

 

And now for some EXCITING NEWS–

~We just put up our Thanksgiving in America Ebook & Funquiz on the Products Page of our website!
~We also just added our Grammar Structures Guide to the Products Page of our website!
~We are so proud to unveil the brand new Bilingual Learner logo here!  A huge thanks and shoutout to our very talented illustrator and designer, Michell Schalik.
~We’ve just been published by the Nepal English Language Teachers Association on just the same topic we are blogging about today!  Check out our article here titled “Culture and Language Learning.”

 

Finally, we’ll leave you with this super-silly comic from the talented Mark Parish…

 

And that brings us to the end of this month’s ESL/counseling post.  Catch up with us again the first Saturday in December for our post focusing on classroom management techniques in both the counseling & ESL/EFL worlds.  We’d love to hear about your November experiences, lessons, or resources, so please leave us a comment.  Remember, just click on the links above and we’ll take you right to an article, video, or product that you can use after you leave us a comment below.  In the meantime, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.

 

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October 4, 2014 · 3:12 am

 Hallo Kitty and Spiderdog!

Happy Fall, Fabulous Readers!  For our October post, we have some super-fun Halloween/fall festival activities for ESL classrooms AND lots of ideas and resources on running school (or non-school) support groups.  A few announcements and then, off we go!

As always, we’ve included a lot of underlined links as helpful resources- just click on them and we’ll take you right to  an article, video, or product you can use!  Some of the links access our free downloadables through Google Docs- please leave a comment below and we’ll send you access to the Goog Doc straightaway!

THE ESL/EFL POST

Happy Early Halloween, Noche de Brujas, Dead of the Dead, and  Día de los Muertos!  To celebrate these fall festival holidays, we’ve had lots of fun reading “In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories,” which is full of repetitive scary stories with easy vocab and perfect for the Halloween season.  Along with this book, we also teach students the scary song, “Have You Seen the Ghost of John?” (page 46), also with easy vocab and lots of repetition perfect for ESL learners.  They love it and we’ve sang it throughout past Octobers with super-simple guitar accompaniment of just four ‘anyone-can-learn-in-an-afternoon’ guitar chords (just google them for finger placement).  Here’s some more Halloween stuff that we are re-sharing, because it’s just that good!  Additionally, here’s a link to Bilingual Learner’s own  fun Halloween passage to teach about this popular American holiday .

And here’s a few more Halloween/fall goodies we want to pass on…

  • Spooky Halloween fun from Busyteacher.org: the holiday
  • Buzzfeed’s Best Teacher Costumes!
  • And, in the spirit of fall and all things slightly scary, you’ve GOT to see the latest Youtube viral video- it is hilarious:  Spiderdog!

THE COUNSELING POST

 Next week, fall counseling groups will start and run through the end of November.  The planning process to get groups up and running is a bit lengthy as there is just so much to do!  Check out our Group Prep Checklist to keep track of all the tasks.  Counselor Stephanie will be running five groups this semester: Middle School 101, Culture Explorers (two separate sessions for different age groups), Get Your Goal On, and Girl World.  Below is a short description of each one…

Middle School 101- This group meets weekly with student who are (already!!) failing multiple core subjects.  In group, students check their grades, identify areas where improvement is needed, and formulate goals with specific behaviors to achieve improvement.  All of this is facilitated through group strategies such as goal sharing, cheerleading, role plays, organizational tips, and scaling.  We will soon start writing our session guide for this group- check out our fun Good Grades Bingo game and a sneak peak here!

Girl World- This group also meets weekly to discuss various issues that adolescent girls struggle with such as friendships, antibullying strategies, rumors/gossip, dating, body image, and more.  We use group strategies such as role plays, read alouds (one of my favorites is Letters to a Bullied Girl), art projects, and games.  For this group, we follow the soon-to-be-published counseling sessions guide by the same name.  Download the first chapter for free @ http://bilinguallearner.com/!

Culture Explorers- This group is for students who are new the the USA (1st year Newcomers).  We use the Culture Explorers curriculum to help them adapt to American life with weekly activities focusing on the cultural values, laws/rules, holidays (free ESL/EFL Halloween resource here!), and traditions of America and American schools.

Get Your Goal On- This is our newest group where members will support each other through group sessions in goal achievement.  Group members include our ‘frequent flyers’ for whom other counseling interventions just haven’t worked and  students whose presenting problem is pretty severe, such as anger over recent CPS removal from parent.  This is our first time trying out this group, so check back with us in a couple of months when we can give the full report.  But in the meantime, here’s a little taste of what we will be using in this group.

 As the school year progresses, we will be sharing updates with ideas and resources on each group.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter (links below) to get real time alerts of when we post these group resources!   And, once again, our all time favorite support group comic:

So, that’s it for our October post.  Hope to see you back here the first Saturday in November for our posts on ELL classroom management, Thanksgiving activities, and guidance/counseling lessons!   Please leave a comment about your group counseling experiences or favorite ESL/EFL Halloween activity.  Let’s all share the wealth!    Remember, just click on the underlined links above and we’ll take you right to  an article, video, or product you can use (after you leave a comment, of course;)   In the meantime, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.

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September 1, 2014 · 3:30 pm

Where There’s a Goal, There’s a Way!

We hope you had a very happy 3 Day Weekend to those of you celebrating Labor Day stateside…and to everyone else, Happy September!  So many new and exciting goings on here at Bilingual Learner this month, that we don’t even know quite where to begin!  Since it is September and the beginning of a new school year for many of you, we will share our latest best practice ESL/EFL teaching strategy that you can use to kick off your classes.  On the counseling front, we have lots of great resources and techniques to share about individual counseling (finally!).  So, let’s get this party started, but first a few noticias:

  • As always, we’ve included a lot of underlined links as helpful resources- just click on them and we’ll take you right to  an article, video, or product you can use!  Some of the links access our free downloadables through Google Docs- please leave a comment below and we’ll send you access to the Goog Doc straightaway!
  • We are super excited to announce that we just put up the first chapter of ESL for Beginners Vol.3 Lessons Guide and Cope Into Hope Grief Counseling Guide for FREE download @ http://bilinguallearner.com/. Head on over and get your free download today!  Also, look for the free first chapters of The Complete ESL for Beginners Lessons Guide AND Girl World Group Counseling Sessions Guide coming soon!
  • Our newest teaching guide, The Complete ESL for Beginners Lessons Guide just went up on our website yesterday- it is huge (60 lesson plans!), it is gorgeous, and it is ready for download @ http://bilinguallearner.com/Products.  More on this with some free downloadables from this guide below…

While writing our latest teaching guide over the summer, we came across some very cool, very cutting edge ESL/EFL techniques.  We thought we’d highlight one of them here in this post and provide a link so you can start using it with your own students!  Last May, while researching new activities for our lessons, we found this Busyteacher.org article on using listening activities with adult learners in ESL classes.  After reading tip four in this article, we were inspired to develop a few new games of our own, specifically geared towards adult learners who need games that are more intellectually stimulating and challenging.  Incidentally, these games are perfectly appropriate for young learners as well.  Click on this link for some of the ESL/EFL vocab games we created!  You can also find them our newest lessons guide, The Complete ESL for Beginners!

And a few other ESL/EFL goodies that we found while researching our latest lessons guide:

And, in honor of the three day weekend us American teachers are celebrating, here’s some advice for Monday morning….

 

And just so you boys out there don’t feel left out…here’s one for you!

 

*******

Now switching gears here to talk a bit about counseling resources, we’d like to first start by showing our #reachhigher photo of Counselor Stephanie.  Her reach higher goal (which is very hard to see in the photo, unfortunately) is, “My #reachhigher goal is to help my chronically failing 8th graders pass their classes.”  Reach Higher is the First Lady’s initiative that encourages young people to complete their education & own their future.  School counselors have a special stake in this which we are showing through pics like these.    

So!  Onto individual counseling…if you are in the counseling profession, you undoubtedly have had some experience with individual sessions.  For new counselors, there are so many questions running through our heads- How often? What do we talk about?  How to get the kiddo to open up?  How many sessions?  How to handle breakdowns? and so on and so on.   Let us preface all this by saying that here at Bilingual Learner, we are very partial to goal focused counseling because our time (like so many PSCs nowadays) in working with students is super limited due huge caseloads.   Therefore, we try to accomplish a lot in about 4 sessions or less, meeting with the student at a set, scheduled time every 2 weeks (just answered the How often? and How many? questions)  For some other answers and helpful tips on effective goal focused individual counseling, read on below:

  • Start with some ice breaker activities if you don’t know the student well.  Have these ice breakers lead into determining what goal the student (and you) want to accomplish in your time together.   Here’s a link to a good ice breaker if you need one.
  • After deciding on a goal with the student, write it down together (index cards work great here) and make photocopies, so (if you are in a school setting) you can send it to them weekly or (if you are in a non-school setting) you can give the student/client a copy each time you meet with them.  This weekly goal reminder is crucial is helping the student/client to remember, revise, and achieve their goal.
  • If you have an unresponsive student/client, try one of the many engaging board games to get them to open up a bit.  Our personal fav is The Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game.  This same strategy works really well in getting students/clients calmed after a breakdown.
  • If you work in a school setting (or even if you don’t), its really helpful to get feedback from teachers as they spend the majority of the day with your student/client.  Additionally, if the student is referred to you by a teacher, we find that it really builds teacher-counselor rapport if you send the teacher a general followup note after your meeting with the student.  Here’s a link to the teacher feedback form we use.

Obviously, with individual counseling, the ideas above are just the tip of the iceberg.  If you need more resources, check out our individual counseling sessions guide, Where There’s a Goal, There’s a Way (or ¡Gol! if you need the Spanish bilingual version) which you can find at this link.

So, that’s it for our September post.  Hope to see you back here the first Saturday in October!  Since we will have wrapped up our first month of 2014-15 teaching and counseling by then, our October post will detail our first month adventures.  Lots of pics and resources coming about getting back into the swing of things.   Please leave a comment about your individual counseling experiences or favorite ESL/EFL teaching technique.  Let’s all share the wealth!    Remember, just click on the underlined links above and we’ll take you right to  an article, video, or product you can use (after you leave a comment, of course;)   In the meantime, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.

 

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August 6, 2014 · 1:49 am

Setting Up Your Kingdom…

Well, Teachers and Counselors, it’s that time of year again!  Time to dust off those shelves and unpack those boxes of new (and old) stuff!!  And if you’re a counselor outside the school system, August is as good a time of year as any to clean out those office cobwebs and touch up with your latest and greatest new counseling materials!   Ditto for you enviable teachers who are still on break or lucky enough to be just wrapping up your work year now. So, in honor of this bittersweet back to school time, we will post some pics and tips for setting up your teaching classroom or counseling office.  But first–EXCITING NEWS– we are also sending out our summer newsletter this week, which will have all of the fab resources and freebies we’ve been saving up for you these last few months, plus a promotional giveaway for a free book!  If you haven’t already put yourself on our newsletter mailing list, do so right now by filling out the eform just to the right of this post! And without further ado, the ESL CLASSROOM… We’ve posted some former ESL classroom photos below so you can see the results of of all our years of ESL trial and error;).  In each photo, we share explanations of ESL teaching tips and materials that work really well, many with links to free or low-cost downloadables and products.  Happy viewing!  As always, we’ve included a lot of links as helpful resources on these topics- the blue ones will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use and the red ones will take you to a freebie that you can download after you leave a comment below (once you leave a comment, the downlojust click on ad automatically gets sent to you within a day). 

 

Here you can see some of our fav ESL read aloud books (download titles here), cards for BINGO,  as well as for alphabet & numbers practice.  We use these cards with our students in every lesson.

 

Here’s a few of of our favorite read alouds that we also like to use for Culture Sessions groups since these titles really nail the switching cultures challenge that all our ESL students face on a daily basis…

 

Students sit at group tables during lessons, since so much of speaking and understanding a language is cooperative and thus involves group work.  You can see the two PDF versions of the ESL for Beginners Lessons Guides that we use as well as the book versions, bingo cards, and vocabulary cards.  Of course there’s also the treasure box, which is full of prizes for students to win since we play games in every lesson.

 

Wider shot of the group table and entrance to classroom.

 

 

Here’s how a group table might look as students enter so we can jump right into the alphabet and number card practice.

 

And now for the COUNSELING OFFICE…In each photo, we share explanations of counseling tips and materials that work really well, many with links to free or low-cost downloadables and products.  Happy viewing!  As always, we’ve included a lot of links as helpful resources on these topics- the blue ones will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use and the red ones will take you to a freebie that you can download after you leave a comment below (once you leave a comment, the download automatically gets sent to you within a day). 

Here’s one of our two bulletin boards- notice the envelope with the green “If You Need to See the Counselor” sign above it…this is one of the many places where students can pick up a request form to meet with us. We don’t do walk-ins except in the “3 Hurts” .

 

Here’s our counseling office lobby.  The red chair/desk is where the student office aides sit and work, checking students in and keeping order in the waiting room. When we lost our secretary budget years back, we started a serious training program for counseling office aides and it is AMAZING what our aides can do (no jobs that would violate confidentiality, of course). One day soon we will publish our counseling office aide training manual- follow us on our Bilingual Learner Facebook or Twitter pages to see when it is available.

 

The Counseling Office Rules (red posterette) are crucial! Office Aides have students read them as they are waiting to see us.

 

Here’s my office…on my door is our TX state school counseling code detailing what school counselors do- it’s great for explaining what our job actually is!

 

This is the bookshelf in my office, right next to the door. The blue cubbies on top of the book shelf may not look like much, but it is an organizational life-saver!! Counselors have their hands in so many different aspects of a school and these cubbies put each type of documentation in its spot. It was 50 bucks for cheap cardboard, but so worth it!  You can also see the shelves in the office are divided into sections for groups, for guidance lessons, for student books, and for professional books/binders. They may seem empty now, but they fill up fast as the year progresses!

 

  The group counseling room.

 

And now for some tips on how to tackle the first week back… If you are like us and the site of an un-organized office or classroom is overwhelming and disorienting, here is a list below of how we tackle the first week in order to have things in order and in process by the time everyone returns:

  • Unpack all materials and set up your office/classroom. (3-6 hours…don’t spend more than a day on this, even if you are breaking in a new office/classroom because it will all change as the year progresses anyway.  Just put everything you have in a place so that you feel somewhat comfortable in your space.)
  • Change out your summer break phone/email message and return any phone messages you acquired while hanging out at the beach. (30 min-1 hour)
  • Check work email and take care of those over-the-summer emails and any others you just couldn’t deal with during the last few days of the 2013-14 school year. (2 hours)
  • Put together your TO DO list and write the tasks in your planner or Outlook Calendar or Smartphone or whatever you use.  This way, you will know when to do them and actually remember to do each task. (1-2 hours if you are continuing from the TO DO list you started for this new school year at the end of 2013-14.  If you didn’t start your 2014-15 TO DO list last year and you have to make it from scratch- block out a half day.)
  • Meet with your colleague (if you have one) to coordinate your activities/plan your lessons for the next two weeks and to set a weekly or monthly planning time to continue meeting regularly through the school year.  After, get your materials together. (2-3 hours counselors, 2-3 days teachers)
  • COUNSELORS ONLY: Set up your waiting room/suite/lobby if you have one. (20 minutes- IF you have an awesome student helper who you can call up to come to the school and do this for you.  In our counseling office, we have amazing office aides each year that we painstakingly train- email us if you need training mats.  Because our counseling office secretary positions were cut a few years ago, our student aides are like mini-office managers and know our suite layout better than we do.  So, we bought our student aide lunch and just let her go- 2 hours later, she was all done and our waiting room sparkled.)
  • Set up and make/email copies of your weekly schedule and yearly calendar/syllabus- post copies wherever you work, on your office door, and email/give to your administrators; its also good at this time to set up with admin a weekly or monthly meeting time that runs throughout the school year so everyone knows: what ASCA/NABE/TESOL recommends that you do, what amazing things you are actually doing, and what admin needs for you to do. (1 hour- IF you laid the foundation for this at the end of the 2013-14 school year with your admin.  If not and you need guidance- email us as it’s too much to go into here.)
  • Start on that TO DO list.   Happy DO-ing!

So, that’s it for our August post.  Hope to see you back here the first Saturday in September!  Maybe we’ll actually get to write that individual counseling post we keep talking about;)  And there’s LOTS brewing in the ESL world- stay tuned for some big revelations and news next month.   Please leave a comment about your back to school experience, office, classroom, or tips.  Let’s all share the wealth!   Remember, we’ll trade ya a comment for a freebie resource- comment below and we’ll send you the code for the resources in RED above so you can download it for free from our Google Docs account. In the meantime, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.

 

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