During this time of year, students and teachers alike start counting down the days until the next school break. Teaching about late fall and winter holidays with Listenwise podcast lessons can help keep your students engaged throughout the holiday season. Our podcast lessons about Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, and other religious holidays can…
Listenwise values the recommended instructional best practice of integrating content and language learning. Doing so is one of the four “Big Ideas” framing the updated WIDA 2020 ELD Standards Framework. Content–language integration means “multilingual learners develop content and language concurrently, with academic content as a context for language learning and language as a means for…
In order to help prioritize and organize the integration of content and language, WIDA has identified four Key Language Uses: NarrateInformExplainArgue These provide focus through an increased emphasis on pedagogy that highlights genres as a way of organizing language use. WIDA’s Key Language Uses also provide a helpful framework for prioritizing academic language development. Each…
Our ELD Lesson Library has been carefully designed to support beginning and intermediate-level English language learners develop proficiency. As these students build a foundation of literacy in another language, while deepening content knowledge, educators can use Listenwise features to scaffold development of essential components of literacy, including phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to…
Our teachers (left to right):Roxana Castro, 4-6 dual language, CASarah Choe, K-5 SpEd teacher, CORobin Hinchcliffe, EL Coordinator, CA We officially launched our ELD Lesson Library and teachers are already talking! Today we’re sharing a conversation we had with three incredible EL educators, two from California and one from Colorado. Each of these teachers has…
This school year, give all your multilingual students a boost with new Listenwise features built specifically to support emergent ELs! Our newly-launched ELD Lesson Library’s multimodal lessons provide several exciting new features, including: Multimodal lessons (podcasts & videos)Optimized assignment experience for emergent ELsImmersive Spanish language supports— with plans to expand to more languages soon! With…
Back-to-school season is planning time — and the perfect chance to prepare to try something new with your students! At Listenwise, we’re excited to support and inspire you as you plan to integrate podcast and video lessons into your curriculum all year long — no matter what you are teaching!* To save you time, we’re…
Summertime is almost here and with it comes an opportunity to step back, take a breath, and practice some self-care. We wish we could reach through the screen and give each and every one of you a high-five for getting through another school year. Instead, we’ve put together a podcast summer listening list designed to…
On May 24th, 2022, a school shooting took the lives of 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. This tragedy joins Parkland and Sandy Hook on the list of horrific school shootings that have taken place in the United States in the last 10 years. Along with the rest of…
How can podcasts teach SEL skills? Can podcasts provide opportunities for teachers to integrate the CASEL framework in their classroom? Absolutely, according to California social studies teacher Dr. Scott Petri. In 2021, we hosted a webinar with Dr. Petri where he shared practical teaching strategies for using podcasts to teach SEL skills to students. Did…
We recently held a webinar with author, educator, and multilingual thought leader Valentina Gonzalez, “Building the Listening-Reading Connection for Multilinguals.” In this webinar, Gonzalez shared her valuable perspective on teaching both reading and listening skills to English language learners. Additionally, she shared two classroom strategies for teachers who want to leverage podcasts to deepen their…
