Instead of Saying "I don't know."

Today, our school hosted a fabulous training from Seidlitz Education.  Our presenter, Valerie, was a great speaker and she taught us many valuable strategies for vocabulary development with all students, including English language learners.  She really made us think about how we teaching.  We were challenged to analyze the way we teach, and consider how much talking we do versus our students.  Our students, especially our ELL's need to talk and use the academic vocabulary more than us!  Yet, we, as teachers, have perfected the art of saying it all!

"Talking doesn't mean teaching!" -Valerie

We were given a copy of John Seidlitz's book, 7 Steps to  Language-Rich Interactive Classroom.  Step 1 is to teach students what to say when they don't know the answer.  I made the posters below to post in my classroom.  I am sharing them with you for free!  Click on the images below to visit my TpT store and download them.

The first 2 posters in the download have 4 questions that my team has decided to focus on in first grade.
The rest have all 6 questions from the book and our training with different colored borders.