Peer Teaching with ELL Students

I have been teaching one student who is an English language learner who came to me at semester how to add and subtract proper fractions for the past three days. Everyday they come in I feel like I am starting from square one each day. I tried teaching by one example at a time, didn't work. I tried teaching using visuals like fraction circles and bars, that failed. The student was getting more and more frustrated, because they weren't moving forward.

I tried a different way. The other students in my class are to graphing linear inequalities. A majority of students in this class speak limited English and/or struggle with mathematics. One of the students finished early and I asked them to help this student.

This was their discussion back in forth in Spanish. It was a great way for both students to move forward mathematically and feel confident going forward.

Link to conversation in Spanish: https://chirb.it/ntn5mD . The sound byte is a minute and a half of the whole conversation which took about 5 minutes. 

The girl in the audio does an excellent job of breaking down the problem and used fraction bars to represent the fractions in the problem. You can hear her counting out the fraction bar in the first part of the audio, eventually she moves towards release of instruction where they did a problem together, then she watched as the student did one guiding through the entire process.

I need to find ways of incorporating more peer teaching for my other students, I wonder how I can help guide them through the steps of asking questions and dialogue between each other better?

English to Spanish Math Glossary

Featured in today's post is an elementary school level mathematics glossary for English to Spanish glossary.  This works great for many teachers who teach in a ELL math classroom or in a high population of Hispanic students.  Some of these glossary terms work great in middle and high school math classrooms.

algebraic expression       expresión algebraica
algebraic patterns           patrones algebraicos
algebraic relationship      relación algebraica
algebraic relationships    relaciones algebraicas
algebraically                  algebraicamente

algorithm                       algoritmo
distributive property      propiedad distributiva
divide                           dividir
dividend                       dividendo
divisibility test               prueba de divisibilidad

geometric fact              hecho geométrico
geometric figure           figura geométrica
geometric pattern         patrón geométrico
geometric solid            sólido geométrico
geometry                     geometría

line                              línea
line graph                    gráfico lineal
line of symmetry          línea de simetría
line plot                      diagrama lineal
line segment                segmento lineal

See more glossary terms in spanish here: Glossary