Question 1

What is a "tense" and why is it important?

Accepted Answer

As native speakers, we were never really taught formal English tenses.

We just learned them naturally, by speaking a lot.

If you ever took Spanish or French though, you'll know all about tenses.

The verbs in a sentence change based on the time frame in which they occurred. That is a tense.

And there are six major tenses in the English language. (There are lots more than that, but the others aren't as common and they are fairly easy considering they are just variations of the six major tenses.)

Here they are:

Present Simple
Present Continuous
Future ("will" & "going to")
Past Simple
Past Continuous
Present Perfect

I've had people argue with me that there is no such thing as a future tense, just a heads up.

In our case, considering we speak about the future using a particular grammar structure, for all effective purposes, it is a future tense, and our students need to know it in order to communicate effectively.

Now...

The next issue is how to teach these tenses.

Well, don't over-explain them.

Children learn English tenses just fine by interacting with their parents without their parents needing to give long, drawn-out grammar explanations.

Kids repeat everything they hear. Over and over.

Parents correct them at times by telling them how to say it correctly.

That's how we want to teach as well.

Tell the students what they need for a tense - a quick grammar explanation.

Then get them practicing it by hearing, speaking, reading and writing it A LOT.

That's it!

And that is exactly how the materials in the ESL Curriculum Membership are set up.

You'll find speaking pages with sentence starters that you can use with your students.

Start by using the example sentences, repeating them until the students have become familiar with the structure.
Then they can start changing words in the sentences to make them their own.
Then they can start making their own sentences in little back-and-forth Q&A activities with partners.
By the end of a class period, they will have said so many sentences in a particular tense that they will be doing it without thinking about it!!

Question 2

Free Kid-Inspired Student Portal Account Terms of Service

Accepted Answer

Free Kid-Inspired Student Portal Account Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are in addition to the regular Kid-Inspired Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

For a limited time, members of the Kid-Inspired Interactive Online ESL Curriculum Membership can create a free account on the Kid-Inspired Student Portal.

This Free Account Comes with the Following Conditions:

The free account will remain active only as long as an active membership to the Interactive ESL Curriculum Membership is maintained.
If the active membership to the Interactive ESL Curriculum Membership is canceled, the free Kid-Inspired Student Portal account will also subsuquently be canceled.

If you have any questions or need any help, please contact support by emailing support@Kid-inspired.com or by visiting the support portal.

Question 3

How do I assign materials online using Seesaw?

Accepted Answer

Using materials on-line in Seesaw is simple.

If you're already a member of the Kid-Inspired community, you can log in and take the course Engaging Learners Online! for lots more resources and strategies you can use while teaching online.

Start the Course

To get access to the curriculum, you can choose from one of the following memberships:

Kid-Inpspired ESL Curriculum Membership ->

Includes the entire curriculum and all supplementary teaching resources.

Independent Teachers Membership ->

Includes the entire **Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership **
Also includes your own website, payment processing, scheduling, course-building software, community of other teachers going independent, training courses on topics such as finding students, desigining your site, marketing, etc.

Question 4

How do I remove students from a group?

Accepted Answer

On the Groups page, when you click on the Details button for a group, a new window will open with that group's details including a list of the students in that group.
To remove a student, simply click on any row. A little popup will appear that says Delete. Click on the Delete button to remove the student from the group.

Question 5

Do you accept purchase orders?

Accepted Answer

Hi customer.first_name,

Purchase orders are accepted. Here is the process:

Follow the link below, choose a membership option, and fill out the quick form to get started.
You can also request a W-9 if needed.
After you fill out the form, I'll send you a quote that you can provide your school.
Once your school approves the quote, they will give you a purchase order which you can send me by hitting reply to this email and attaching the purchase order.
After receiving the purchase order, I will set up the account for you and send you an invoice that you can pass along to the accounting department.
The invoice needs to be paid within 30 days.

Get a Quote ->

Get a W-9 ->

Question 6

Free ELL Management Portal Account Terms of Service

Accepted Answer

Free ELL Management Portal Account Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are in addition to the regular Kid-Inspired Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

For a limited time, members of the Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership, Interactive Online ESL Curriculum Membership, or Independent Teachers Membership can create a free account in the ELL Management Portal Membership.

This Free Account Comes with the Following Conditions:

Fifty student seats are provided with the free account.
The free account will remain active only as long as an active memberbership to one of the following is maintained: ESL Curriculum Membership, Interactive ESL Curriculum Membership, Independent Teachers Membership.
If the active membership to the ESL Curriculum Membership, Interactive ESL Curriculum Membership, or the Independent Teachers Membership is canceled, the free ELL Management Portal Membership account will also subsuquently be canceled.

If you have any questions or need any help, please contact support by emailing support@Kid-inspired.com or by visiting the support portal.

Question 7

How do I assign materials online using Google Classroom?

Accepted Answer

Using materials on-line in Google Classroom is simple.

If you're already a member of the Kid-Inspired community, you can log in and take the course Engaging Learners Online! for lots more resources and strategies you can use while teaching online.

Start the Course

To get access to the curriculum, you can choose from one of the following memberships:

Kid-Inpspired ESL Curriculum Membership ->

Includes the entire curriculum and all supplementary teaching resources.

Independent Teachers Membership ->

Includes the entire **Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership **
Also includes your own website, payment processing, scheduling, course-building software, community of other teachers going independent, training courses on topics such as finding students, desigining your site, marketing, etc.

Question 8

How do standards and scoring work with the assessments?

Accepted Answer

Here is the formula used in the portal to get a score for a language domain on an assessment:

(Number Correct / Standard ) * 100 = Score

The standard gives us a little more flexibility in what we expect students should accomplish on an assessment.

How do standards work and why do we have it set up this way?

Most teachers grade assessments with the following formula: Number Correct / Total Number of Questions. This means that the standard they are expecting students to meet is 100%, to get all of the answers correct. If there are 10 questions on the assessment, I am expecting students to get all 10 correct.

But what if a student gets 8 correct and has shown a good grasp of the content? Did they meet your expectations still? If so, then we can consider setting the standard at 8. Any students who score 8 out of 10 will then get a score of 100%. Students who get 9 or 10 out of 10 will get 110% or 120% accordingly.

It's a little like grading on a bell curve only we are not setting the standard based on the strongest and weakest students results on an assessment, but instead on a goal we would like to see students achieve that shows they have sufficiently grasped the content.

There are a lot of benefits to setting it up this way.

This lets us use a variety of assessment types and map them in the same way on a chart.

This strategy allows us to have assessments where there is no upper limit on the number they can achieve. For example, if our assessment is to see how many sentences a student can say in a minute, or how many words a student can read in a minute. We only need a goal or standard in this situation to get a score and then we will see that same range of ability. This also works for assessments where there is a specific number of questions to be answered, but students do not necessarily need to answer all of the questions correctly in order to show that they have grasped the content well. This is particularly helpful when it comes to something like writing paragraphs or essays. When you're grading student writing with a rubric, there is usually a total number of possible points, but that represents exceptional work. We don't need all of our students to achieve that level of writing to prove competency.

**The data we receive can be more helpful. **

We get to see a spread of data around the goal we have set. We can see which students have exceeded the goal and probably need some more challenging work, which students have met the goal, and which students are still in need of extra practice in that area. If most students are under the standard, we know that is likely an issue with how we have taught the material, whereas if most students have met the standard, we know that certain students may need to use a different kind of strategy to reach the standards.

The ultimate goal of assessments is...

to get actionable data on how students are doing in each area so that we can make better decisions about what will be most helpful for them.

If students are consistenly scoring well above 100%, then we know that the content may be too easy and we may want to step it up a notch.
If we notice students are consistenly scoring below 80% in an area such as reading while doing well in other areas, we know that we should focus extra time on reading and less time on other areas.

For WIDA scoring...

...the suggested standard is 4.5 since that is usually what is required for students to exit the ELL program. Then formula for an assessment then would be, for example, listening 3.3/4.5=73%. This means the student is 73% of the way to the goal for listening of exiting the ELL program.

Basically, when you see a percentage score for an assessment, it means that they are that far along to the goal!

Question 9

How does the numbering on the lesson pages work? (i.e. Unit 1 #1, Unit 1 #1.1, etc)

Accepted Answer

If you've started using the curriculum, then you've probably noticed the numbers at the top of the pages within lessons.

The numbering system may seem a little odd at first.

Let me explain the logic behind the system and why it can be a little odd at times:

**Here were the criteria I wanted to meet: **

Each page, organizer and worksheet had its own number in case you were assigning a single page to students and needed to refer to it.
Subsidiary pages would be numbered in relation to their primary page. (Primary page like a vocabulary page for instance = Unit 1 #1; Subsidiary pages like vocabulary worksheets related to the primary page = Unit 1 #1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.)

**Here were some of the challenges that came up: **

Over the course of creating materials for the curriculum, some of which were created only for the site (we don't use them at our school) a couple of things happened from time to time:

Sometimes, subsidiary pages could relate to more than one primary page and when I chose to put them in one lesson as opposed to another, the numbering was sometimes off.
Sometimes, I chose to leave out a page from a lesson because I didn't feel like it was up to standard or was one too many pages for that lesson or still needed work. This has created gaps at times in the numbering.

The primary reason for the system is to give you a way to refer to a specific page, so you can safely ignore it if it does not benefit you.

Question 10

What are ELL Student Plans?

Accepted Answer

The ELL Student Plans are a great way to share detailed information about your ELLs with colleages, admin, or parents.

The plans include:

Student Background Information
Can Dos Based on Assessment Results
Recommended/Required Instructional Accommodations
Recommended/Required Testing Accommodations
Goals in Different Language Domains
Notes

Not all information needs to be filled in if it is unecessary for your situation. If you have a Student Plan template that you'd like to see added, contact support and we will see if we can make it possible.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Create Student Plans
Filter the Table to Show the Student Plans You want to Download
Click the Download Student Plans Button in the Reports Toggle at the bottom of the page.