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

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Say It with Your Hands
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Say It with Your Hands

Lesson Objective: Use hand gestures to clarify language
All Grades / All Subjects / ELL

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Discussion and Supporting Materials

Thought starters

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

18 Comments

  • Private message to sukanya mohanan

sukanya mohanan Jun 24, 2018 11:53am

Amazing ideas i 'd like to use them in my practise too. Thank yo.
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  • Private message to Tracy Beck

Tracy Beck May 9, 2018 10:04pm

This is a great strategy to use for young learners too.
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  • Private message to Mary Brewer

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!

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  • Private message to Muyibat Folami

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.
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  • Private message to Mary Brewer

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!!

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  • Private message to Stephanie Marquez

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!
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  • Private message to Jeremy Dixon

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.
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Materials

Transcripts

  • Say It with Your Hands Transcript

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

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    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

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School Details

Glen Park Elementary School
151 Lippard Avenue
San Francisco CA 94131
Population: 344

Data Provided By:

greatschools

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Anna Dearlove
English Language Arts Math Science Social Studies Arts / 2 / Teacher

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