Planning for English Language Learners

Next semester I plan to teach a unit on color theory. I have chosen four different stages of language learners that might be in my class for this coming year. These are speech emergent, beginning fluency, intermediate fluency, and advanced fluency.  For the emergent learner the basic vocabulary is already there and that the vocabulary has increased and the times they make mistakes have decreased. But they still need some extra help when it comes to making connections and using the vocabulary. A lot of the students may have some of the basics for the color wheel, but they will go deeper into the concept of what color holds in this world. For this reason I will be having students write down all vocabulary words at the beginning of the lesson, before we get started, that way they will not be shocked when different words come up they will be ready for them. And then I will emphasis the words throughout the instructions, making sure students remember to use them when explaining them.This is one of the first step in the English Language teaching strategies. Keeping the vocabulary where students can see will help students make the vocabulary that will be used common. For the students who are beginning fluency and still have trouble to express himself because of gaps in vocab or appropriate phrases. Even though students may struggle with gaps in their vocab, they still will be expected to communicate with each other during their art critics when it comes to explaining their rough draft, final project, and art critiques. Having sentence stems in their sketchbook to help when giving these talks will help students be able to communicate more fluently without worry. Some of these sentence stems could be, “The reason I chose these colors is________”, “I find that your use of balance is__________”. This is based off of the second strategies for English Language teachers, which is “guided learning”. For the students who are intermediate, they already demonstrate a higher order thinking skill, and therefore can offer an opinion or analyze a problem, using the strategy of authentic assessment we will use a variety mini projects and different ways to assess in the unit. So instead of just having one final project at the end of the unit to assess if they understood the concepts. Instead we will be using a variety of mini projects in the sketchbook like an echo line project that focuses only on tone, value, and tint, a paper cutting project that focuses on the concept of complementary colors, a small color theory quiz, a sketch book assignment that focuses on composition and balance in the artwork. This way we can see if they actually understood all the concepts over time. The final language learner will be the advance fluency where is essentially fluent but with accent. Which doesn't need much additional help, but could use the previous strategies along with meaning based, to have students connect on a deeper level with the content.