The Understanding Language team at Stanford University has just released its first major collection of common core instructional resources in math meant for teachers who work with English-language learners.
A team of experts, including Judit Moschkovich, a professor of mathematics education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used or adapted tasks from two series of curricula: Inside Mathematics and the Mathematics Assessment Project. Each lesson in the package includes detailed notes on how teachers can use them in classrooms with English-learners.
The aim behind these materials is to help teachers see how math tasks rooted in the common core can be used to support both math learning and language development. The four lessons cover elementary, middle, and high school math.
The package also includes templates of “language of math” activities that teachers can use as a guide to write their own language-focused tasks to help ELLs learn to read and understand word problems, talk about math, build up math-specific vocabulary, and develop practices in math.
Earlier this year, the Understanding Language team published its first common-core English/language arts model lessons for ELLs—a five-week unit for middle school students on persuasion. All the resources developed by the team are available for free to educators.
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