Hello Summer Vacay! Oh, it’s that glorious time of the year when US teachers and school counselors throw their hands up in the air in FREEDOM! Sorry to all you overseas educators who are still slugging away at your schools, but we’ll be envying you big time come December and January…
So, our June post is a shorter one because we have just sent out our quarterly newsletter with 19 different downloadable resources that we’d normally put in this post. So, sign up to the right asap if you haven’t already received our latest newsletter. However, in the spirit of our monthly post, we do have some updates and freebies for you. Read on below and, as always…we’ve included a lot of helpful resources- just click on the green links which will take you right to an article, video, or product you can use after you leave a comment below.
BILINGUAL LEARNER UPDATES
- Look for our new beginners ESL guide, ESL Express, later this summer. It will be a streamlined version of ESL for Beginners that is organized into 4 weekly units.
- We just sent our latest ESL teaching guide, ESL in the Middle: Lessons Guide for Teaching Intermediate Students to our editor! As soon as Anne works her editing magic, we will have it up on the website for order. A sneak peek and freebie downloadable from this intermediate ESL/EFL teaching guide is now available on the left side of our homepage!
- The Spanish version of Girl World: Girl Empowerment Group Counseling Guide, Charla Entre Chicas, is FINALLY ready for publication. Look for it on our products page in the next few weeks.
- A huge shoutout to the newest member of the Bilingual Learner team, Monica Briancon, our amazing Spanish editor who we had to go all the way to Bolivia to find! We’ve been searching for her for 2 years, but she is definitely worth the wait!
- Get ready for our latest counseling guides, The Unstressables and Get Your Goal On! These 2 books on anti-anxiety techniques and academic achievement strategies are starting production this week!! We are super excited and can’t wait to get going on them! Look for updates, free preview downloadables, and ordering details on our website or FB page below.
- Another huge shoutout to our fabulously talented illustrator, Michell Schalik, for the new Be Cool: Anger Management Group Counseling Guide illustrations that will go into our revised guide later this summer. The pics are wonderful and a sneak peak is above.
- FYI- we provide free revised editions of all our Bilingual Learner guides to all our customers who request them. You can find out when we publish a revised guide by subscribing to our newsletter because we advertise updated editions of our books there. Once you hear of a revised guide, just email us at bilinguallearner@hotmail.com with your name, the name of the guide, the date you purchased it, and where you purchased it from (our website, TPT, Amazon, etc) and we will get an electronic version of your revised guide emailed right out to you!
END-OF-YEAR ESL/EFL TIPS 
If you are ending your ESL classes for the school year, consider these tips:
- Keep students engaged in meaningful lessons until the last day of class. Although the temptation is strong to start showing videos and letting students play games, this will only frustrate you as class time crawls and everyone wastes their time (or worse-misbehavior starts). Consider incorporating meaningful lesson content into fun activities such as field trips or art projects. And in case you haven’t yet taught contractions… Click on this freebie contractions chart to have some meaningful content to incorporate into your fun end-of-the-year activities!
- Give students a reading list of favorite, easy reader English chapter books that they can enjoy over the summer in order to keep their English fresh.
- During lunch or off-times, enlist your students to help you pack up your classroom. Spend an afternoon organizing various jobs for various students, give them a 30 minute training session and let them go! While your student movers are working, you can use this time to research some dynamic lessons and units for next year!
ENDING YOUR COUNSELING SESSIONS
But first, a fun freebie for working with those academic underachievers: The No Zeroes Race! Do you have students who struggle with passing their classes? We do and as part of our academic achievement group counseling curriculum, we play The No Zeroes Race with our group members. For the racetrack and directions, click here!
If you are in the counseling profession, this time of year brings lots of closure. We wrap up guidance lessons and terminate individual/group sessions as students leave on summer trips or move away. So, for this post, Bilingual Learner has included a few downloadables to help you with ending your sessions and lessons. We think there are many different ways to effectively wrap up your counseling sessions, but all should include discussions throughout counseling of when the final session will be and also discussion about how to make future contact with the counselor, if needed. For all our groups and individual sessions we run, we have students fill out an evaluation during the last session to show us what they have learned, how they have grown, and ways we might improve our sessions for the future-here is the evaluation from our counseling guide, Be Cool! – it is the group evaluation from this guide, but can easily be modified for use with individuals, too. We use anonymous quotes from the session evaluations in our data presentations to school stakeholders to show them the power and effectiveness of counseling- you can see an example of this from the preview of our Girl World Group Counseling Sessions Guide coming out this summer. If you would like to see the rest of our group and guidance lesson data tools, just click the “Group and Guidance Lessons Tools” icon link on our homepage. Alternately, for school-wide counseling programs, we have every student on campus complete this evaluation of our program and the lessons we have taught. We also plot all the data collected in our student program evaluations on excel charts/graphs and present them as well to the school leadership team. While all of these forms work primarily as evaluation tools, we also use them as a sort of needs assessment for future lessons and counseling sessions since we work with many of the same students from year to year.
That brings us to the end of this month’s post. Catch up with us again the first Saturday in July for our next MYSTERY post. As always, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page or Pinterest Page.
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Source: Bilingual Learner
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