Biliteracy+and+Bilingualism+Teaching+Resources

I found a blog by Courtney Klaetsch called [|“Courtney K’s Biliteracy Development Blog.”]

She is a second grade dual language teacher and she created this blog as part of her class project regarding to biliteracy development. She listed one of her students, Quentin as an example throughout her posts. Interestingly, she offered some descriptions about how Quentin became a sequential bilingual since he speaks English at home and had to be exposed to Spanish when he began attending “Nuestro Mundo Community School.” This blog offers a great example about kids that are native English speakers and they enrolled into school districts that offer bilingual education. So it will be very interesting to look at his growth in biliteracy in comparison to Emma’s learning experience.

Winnie He

___

When I was searching the web trying to find a good web resource for biliteracy education, I found one of them right in front of me:

[]

Wordpress at the surface appears to be a useful tool for the blogger that wants a space to post their ramblings on the net for free. But, an often underutilized function of wordpress is installing your own wordpress "server", on your own web server. On the surface, this appears to be difficult to set up, but in reality it is quite easy. Also, the beauty of using a local wordpress server is that it does NOT have to be connected to the internet. As posting sensitive information concerning students on the internet is not legal without parental consent, the wordpress software can be easily configured to work on a school intranet (school computer network).

As a tool, wordpress could be used as a means to track the biliterate development of students in a school district. The blog format of wordpress easily lends itself to tracking posts by date, month, year, etc. Also, this is a convenient means for school administrators/department heads to keep track of the literary development of students, as well as watch for students that might need additional help and encouragement on their paths to becoming biliterate. As Kabuto did in Becoming Biliterate, teachers could use wordpress to save/document every student's literary development (and use it as an invaluble tool for tracking progress in their program/assessing what their students should spend more time working on in the classroom. And the best parts about this software:

01). Its FREE 02). its simple and easy to keep it as part of a closed system on a school disctrict computer network. 03). You can set up a wordpress server in about 5 min. 04). The uses for this tool in the classroom are endless, but lend themselves well to literary development.

If anyone in class has any questions about wordpress, dont hesitate to ask me (as I run my website off of it).

-Peter Celentano

A spot to post links related to "Becoming Biliterate," with a focus on resources to support teachers in supporting students and enhancing your curricula.


 * Formatting tips: Use the link next to 'bullets' in the text editor to insert a horizontal line at the end of your entry, just to keep the page neat. Stick to a standard font style & size, but go ahead and add color or images (not too many!) if you feel it will enhance your entry. Be sure to set-up links so they open in a new page (choose that option when you insert the link). You'll see the little green arrow when you do. If you struggle with spelling, type your entry in Word first and check before you post here. Finally, use "Header 1" under the dropdown menu to format the title for your entry. This will automatically provide a link in the Table of Contents. **

Biliteracy Curriculum

This website is a wonderful resource on biliteracy in the classroom. It talks about different programs and approaches to biliteracy instruction. With some wonderfully well-informed descriptions of it's own system, and also a philosophy of the curriculum, they present a general “Curriculum framework for Biliteracy Development”. They divide two sections, one for spanish reading, and the other for english language, which is important, since teaching only reading, as opposed to a language in general require two different approaches. They even have a link to a large number of books which they cite as “References”, along with more resources at the bottom of the page. While there are any numbers of articles and books one can look up by searching for biliteracy instruction, I found this particular website to be the most helpful!

This website is a great resource directed towards parents, who are raising bilingual/biliterate children and educators who encounter bilingual students. The two best features of this website are the glossary of technical terms and the list of additional web resources, which are primarily blogs from a wide range of people. It's nice because there are blogs from parents who are raising bilingual/biliterate children, and so in your teaching, if you come across a parent who has questions about raising their child to be biliterate, you can direct them to additional resources. The website also offers valuable articles on raising, and working with biliterate children. There are parent-to-parent interviews and there's also even an article by a woman who is raising her child to be trilingual. 
 * Name of Source: **Multilingual Mania
 * URL: [|multilingualmania.com] **
 * Description: **

= **Bilingualism to the University of Michigan** =

The web source that found is called [|Bilingual Education] from the University of Michigan. This went over pro's and con's or bilingual education, different types of bilingual education and legislative history of bilingual education. Since this is not really for music education the website proves what it is worth by stating what we will see as teachers. For example ESL (English as a second language) students will participate in classrooms of native speaking English speakers. And while we should not discourage their native language we should also encourage the use of English while including aspects of the foreign language.