In second grade at our school, we had some success splitting up our classes for English Language Development time. In California this is a required 30 minutes a day that I get the sense is rarely implemented.

One teacher would take ELD 1-2 (that was me), another took ELD 2-3, another 3-5, and then we had a teacher for advanced English only, remedial English only, and plain old English only.

This allowed me, working with the lower ELD students to focus on learning and speaking basic academic English without boring other students and provide them with a lower stress environment for learning English.

Some teachers have said this will not work in their schools because they don’t get along with grade level teams. The good news, although I really like the people I work with, we haven’t always gotten along either! The good news is you don’t have to have everyone on board to do this. If you have two teachers, or three teachers, you can change the arrangement of students to make this work for you. Although you should employ SDAIE strategies when teaching the Open Court program this is not a substitute for a time of day when you teach the English language explicitly. I hope this might work for some of you.