We know people learn through different means…visual, auditory, kinesthetic, aural, logical, social and solitary…and one size doesn’t fit all, so why do we teach like it does?

Judie Haynes has spent much of her life teaching ELL students and has immense knowledge on the best ways to help and teach them in your classroom. On her website, www.everythingesl.net, she has an article titled, Seven Teaching Strategies for Classroom Teachers of ELLs which gives a brief overview of seven great strategies all classroom teachers could use in their classroom in order assist ELLs.

Using visuals in your classroom helps all students. They are able to connect your spoken words with the visual words or picture. Through seeing the picture or graphic representation they are able to connect the unknown English word to a word they know in their first language (L1). Using visuals will allow the student to learn English…

I began a blog post this morning about Ferguson:

The grand jury reached a decision in the Michael Brown case. The police officer who killed him gets to walk free.

I had to pry myself off the Ferguson hashtag a few minutes ago because I was feeling sick. Not only did this injustice occur (again), someone got off scott-free (again).

Frustrated, I stopped my writing there.  I have blogged about this topic before, and felt like it was pointless to do so again.  There was nothing new that I could say that would fix anything.  It was an exercise in futility.  Dejected, I prepared for work.

On the daily commute, I vented a bit to one of my Voxer groups.  In talking to members of my PLN, the idea struck me to have my eighth-grade students blog about their thoughts collectively, for multiple reasons:

• To allow my students space to process and…