Sam Habeck
WSTS7 ESL artifact reflection
My artifact for standard seven is a three-week ESL unit on communities for a
bilingual K5 classroom. This unit reflects the standard through my collaboration with the
classroom teachers to create experiences in the classroom that are relevant to the students,
follows our curriculum goals, and shows my investment in long and short term planning. I
created the lessons for the two kindergarten teachers, who each taught one of the three
groups we split the 34 students into, and worked with them around what they were
teaching in Spanish during the day, and what activities we could incorporate to enhance the
lessons and the students experiences. We had lessons that were based on the principles of
effective instruction, applying different learning styles and scaffolds to aid students in their
learning. Within my section of the lesson plan we played different games that allowed the
students to physically act out words, for example when teaching the past tense I had
students do different actions. Then they would sit down and I would ask the whole group
what the student did. This allowed them to practice and physically experience the past
tense in the classroom. As well as playing ‘Simon Says’ to practice prepositions and give
them a chance to move around, which is important at their developmental levels.
While talking about the community we compared the community the students live
in to other communities, and discussed what people do in communities. Then I had
students verbally share what their families do in the community to give their background
knowledge a place in the lesson. All of these parts of the lesson I taught and created
followed the plan that Wisconsin Department of Instruction wants schools to follow so
should students move between schools they are not missing huge parts of the curriculum.
So through my collaboration and consideration within my lessons I organize and plan
Sam Habeck
WSTS7 ESL artifact reflection
instruction that is rooted in the subject matter, the students, the community and the
curriculum goals.