Inside Bell's Brain

I'm really excited to accept the TpT Seller Challenge hosted by the fabulous ladies at Third in Hollywood , Teach Create Motivate , Peppy Zesty Teacherista , and Sparkling in Second .  Sometimes being a seller can be difficult to balance with our other life roles, so we're taking on one task at a time ...together.  The "pre-task" was collecting our social media stats .  This week was so busy that I noted mine on Tuesday morning, but I got distracted and didn't post them to Instagram until today!  So here's where I'm beginning ... This week is the official first week of the challenge , and this week's task was a Makeover Madness challenge.  We were supposed to take an existing product in our stores and give it a little "face lift."  We were free to design and re-design however we wanted, as long as we shared/blogged about our "before and after" and shared it with the other challengers. I took on my product " How to...

  Getting started is often the most difficult part of writing.  That's true for native English speakers and English learners alike.  But as is often true, what is effective instructional practice for ELs makes for effective practice for our native English speakers also.  With that in mind, one solution to the writing dilemma is using sentence frames.  Sentence frames allow writers to concentrate on the most important part of writing (the sharing and communication of ideas) rather than worrying about the syntax (structure) and grammar of the sentence.  For example, if you're writing a compare and contrast paper, an appropriate sentence frame might be, "(This) and (that) are alike because _________________."  This allows ELs and other students to really concentrate on what they're trying to express about the comparison rather than stressing about the structure they need to express this idea.  Sentence frames can be as complex or as simple as yo...