"It was wonderful to have the support of the Kid-Inspired ESL teaching materials."

- Mara Elliot K-6 ESL Teacher, U.S.

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Mara's Testimonial

As an English Language Development (ELD) teacher for a charter school in San Diego, California, my job was to provide specialized instruction for ELL students (English Language Learners).

The lessons I designed had two purposes:

to support the students with developing the language tools they needed to do well in their English speaking classrooms
to help them pass the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC)

Once they passed the ELPAC, it was no longer a requirement for them to be pulled out of their regularly scheduled classes for additional ELD practice.

Similar to the ELPAC exam, Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum focuses on the same main domains: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

To support reading, Kid-Inspired Classroom provides new vocabulary words for each unit that help students comprehend the content for the required reading material within that unit. In addition to vocabulary, the Bambini textbook has additional activities that support the students with the unit's reading requirements before (front load), during (support), and after reading (assessment).
The writing domain is tackled by giving the students a writing assignment (or two) per unit that goes with the given theme for the unit. The writing is differentiated according to their level. Younger students may only be required to produce a sentence, whereas older students may be required to produce paragraphs or essays. This gives the students a chance to think about the content, the vocabulary, and grammar they have learned within the unit and apply it to their writing.
The speaking domain is also covered in each unit for all levels. For each unit, the students are required to answer questions and have discussions with the teacher and their peers about the topic. This is another opportunity for the students to use the vocabulary and grammar they learned in the unit by producing it verbally themselves.
Lastly, the listening domain is covered in Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum as well. The students are often required to listen to stories and answer questions about them. This way the students are hearing the new vocabulary and grammar structures defined in the unit, and are given proper real life examples of how it is used. This further solidifies new information, so that they may use it properly in their own production of the language.

The ESL teaching materials are both teacher and student friendly.

The primary pages of each unit are mainly tools for the teachers and students.

For example, the vocabulary is given in one or two pages per unit with pictures to match.

The primary page is like an Exit Ticket for language or content objectives. Activities and worksheets are separate.
The teachers are free to design their lessons and to pick from the provided supplemental materials that support differentiated student needs. The teacher can do flash cards, worksheets, and games to help the students achieve the desired goal.
In addition, the students benefit from this because they are able to meet the goal defined by the primary page by any means necessary for them. Each student may have different needs and benefit from an array of different activities.
Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum allows for students to achieve language goals in a way that is best for each individual.

In addition, each unit and level of Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum slowly increases difficulty of tasks.

In this way, it closely aligns with Bloom's Taxonomy levels:

remember (recall facts),
understand (explain ideas or concepts),
apply (use new information),
analyze (draw connections among ideas),
evaluate (justify, argue, defend), and
create (produce an original work).

You can see many of the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy increasing within each level and many increase within each unit of Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum. Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum slowly increases the difficulty level of tasks so that each task is harder than the last, but not so hard that it creates frustration.

Lastly, each unit of Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum has a strong theme.

The themes allow the students to learn new topics and vocabulary contextually. The students revisit the content through the theme by reading it, hearing it, speaking it, and writing it. Thus, solidifying what they had learned into their memory in an engaging way. All the themes are interesting to the students.

This makes the acquisition of knowledge easy and fun. They learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, etc. This repetition of newly acquired knowledge through different mediums of language, supports research that in order to learn new content students must use it many times in many different ways.

It was wonderful to have the support of Kid-Inspired Classroom ESL materials in the classroom.

The curriculum allows for seamless instruction that builds in difficulty without being rigid and overbearing. My school did not provide materials beyond practice tests to help support my students with language acquisition. I recommend Kid-Inspired Classroom's curriculum and supplemental materials to anyone looking to support their students with the main domains of English.

Mara Elliott, K-6 Teacher in the United States