Sheltered Content Curriculum
The
bilingual staff at Chelan High School has been creating sheltered
content curriculum for transitional bilingual students since 1993-94.
Chevy Kneisley, the original high school transitional bilingual
teacher at Chelan High School, was named master teacher and curriculum
writer as part of a Title VII grant. Since then, twenty courses
have been created and taught in the sheltered content format. Fourteen
of those courses have been field tested in both day and night programs
and prepared for dissemination to Washington State schools with
limited English proficient populations.
All of the sheltered content courses are based on comparable goals
and objectives to courses taught in mainstream high schools. Five
of these courses have been aligned with the state essential learnings
in communication, reading, and writing. We are convinced by five
years of experience with sheltered content that limited English
students perform better in mainstream classes and increase in their
desire and ability to graduate from high school when they include
sheltered content curriculum into their early second language acquisition
process.
Monolingual students begin the process of acquiring English at both
day and night schools in a Newcomer Center. The newcomer curriculum
consists of ten units of study that develop a vocabulary of 600
English words. Students learn through the trilogy of speaking, reading,
and writing and they participate in dialogues, chants, role plays,
T.P.R. exercises, games, and traditional academic exercises. Each
student monitors his own progress on activity sheets that keep a
record of all of his participation. The curriculum which we have
been creating is sheltered content. It builds on the basic 600 word
vocabulary that is introduced in the newcomer classes and expands
into the vocational, social studies, science, math, health, literature,
language, and composition areas. This curriculum answers a need
that all teachers of secondary limited English students have: A
need to provide content at a second grade reading level, but at
an adolescent interest level that meets district goals and objectives
and allows L.E.P.' s to learn and to experience success. The Title
VII sheltered content curriculum that we are creating keeps students
in school and steadily moves them towards English fluency and graduation.
In the day program, two sheltered content courses are taught each
semester for credit. They are rotated so that students who are still
part of the transitional bilingual program can have access to different
contents. In the night program, all of the classes are sheltered
content. They are rotated over a three year period so that students
passing out of the Newcomer Center can take different courses each
semester and eventually complete all nineteen credits for a Washington
State diploma. We are very proud of the options and opportunities
sheltered content provides for students. We are proud, also, that
students in the night program have the opportunity to work toward
a diploma. Since the beginning of Chelan Preparatory High School,
21 students have graduated. About a third of those students are
dropout retrievals from our day high school or other school districts
and two thirds have stayed four or five years in the night program
to complete the credits. Night school Chelan Preparatory High School
graduation is separate from the day school. It is a celebration
of great significance because students who had no hope of graduation
are wearing the cap and gown and marching towards their diploma.
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