Series Five Essential Practices for the Teaching of ELLs - Elementary : Say It with Your Hands

Fact or Opinion: An Integrated ELD Lesson

Just the Facts: A Social Studies Lesson

Second Set Partners: A Turn and Talk Strategy

Warming Up with Rug Partners

The Line Up Strategy

Making a Claim About Variation: Designated ELD

Finding Variations in Living Organisms

Currently Playing

Say It with Your Hands

Using Technology to Collect Classroom Data

Say It with Your Hands

Lesson Objective: Use hand gestures to clarify language

All Grades / All Subjects / ELL

2 MIN

Discussion
Supporting Materials

Thought starters

How can you build hand gestures into lesson planning?
How can you encourage your students to use hand gestures?
Why is this strategy especially useful for English Language Learners?

18 Comments

sukanya mohanan Jun 24, 2018 11:53am

Amazing ideas i 'd like to use them in my practise too. Thank yo.

Recommended (0)

Tracy Beck May 9, 2018 10:04pm

This is a great strategy to use for young learners too.

Recommended (0)

Mary Brewer Mar 4, 2019 1:26am

I teach Kindergarten and I can see how useful this is. Almost half of my class is ELL, and I find that using gestures gets the students moving, and with movement comes more understanding and brain connections!

Recommended (0)

Muyibat Folami Jan 21, 2018 9:03am

Great one. Hand movement can be used for all grade level. It leads to a greater understanding and retention of content taught.

Recommended (0)

Mary Brewer Mar 4, 2019 1:27am

Yes- once you have students moving with you, you have their brains connected to what you are teaching!!

Recommended (0)

Stephanie Marquez Nov 21, 2017 4:04pm

Hand movements are an awesome and effective way for ELL students to expand on their vocabulary and reading comprehension. Great strategy!

Recommended (0)

Jeremy Dixon Jun 28, 2017 6:09pm

Hand signals are good for ELL learners. It allows them to paint a picture in their mind. This might be good to pair up ELL and non-ELL'S that way communication will happen no matter what.

Recommended (2)

Materials

Transcripts

Say It with Your Hands Transcript

Speaker 1: We're going to do it together. One thing that I use to support

View More

Say It with Your Hands Transcript

Speaker 1: We're going to do it together. One thing that I use to support all my learners including my English language learners is to use hand movements, so they understand better what I'm talking about. Let's read a little bit more here. People are different. Some people are short, some have brown eyes. When I'm planning a lesson, I try to think of all the gestures that I could use to support that lesson. Size, texture. Right now we're doing a lesson on variations. Shape could be circular. It could be wavy shapes, bumpy shape, jagged shape. What's this? Small or tiny. What was different in that? Sometimes I'll use hand movements in the reverse like I saw you using a gesture, like what does that mean? Can you tell me, when the couldn't really articulate it in words.

Speaker 2: The wings.

Speaker 1: What did you say, the rings?

Speaker 2: The wings.

Speaker 1: The wings. What about the wings? For EL learners, as well as everybody, actually, it really gets that concept attainment or the vocabulary, what it is. If I make a gesture, it's an international language. I can use that in addition to writing something down or talking about it intellectually. Some were ...

Speaker 3: Big, and the shape.

Speaker 1: The shape of them. I try to use that as much as possible for all students. Some people can run fast.

View Less