Real Life Language

What is Real Life Language?
English as a second language students in grades K-8 climb aboard a school bus once a month to engage in authentic and meaningful experiences as they visit places of interest in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Field trips are incorporated into the curriculum to supplement classroom instruction and to expose the students to new and different real life experiences outside of regular classroom instruction. Field trips do not end once the trip is physically over, but continue into the classroom with follow-up activities. These follow-up activities include but are not limited to writing thank you letters to places visited, downloading digital pictures renaming them and then using them in stories and presentations, creating digital essays of the trip, giving oral reports to mainstream classmates about the trip, and creating bulletin boards. Parents of ESL students are also welcome on the field trips and the trips are offered to both the parent and child at no charge.

If field trips to a place are not feasible, try electronic or virtual field trips. There are some wonderful places on the Internet that the students can visit without leaving the classroom.

All of our students, grades K-8 are invited to go on field trips free of charge. Grant money is used to cover all of the expenses. All of the field trips are planned with two other school districts. This is a nice way for students to meet new friends.

Why take ESL students on field trips?
English as a second language students often come to the United States, settle in one area, and do not venture far from the area they are comfortable with. Parents of these students usually speak only their native language. This limits their children’s exposure to the English language. ESL students also lack the experiences of their American counter parts. Field trips engage the holistic child through visual, auditory, tactile and multi-sensory experiences to promote English language learning. The field trips are specifically identified to matrix with the core curriculum areas of Science, Math, Language Arts Literacy, Social Studies, Music, and Visual Arts. By providing these experiences outside of the typical classroom setting, field trips promote hands on, real life experiences that lead to faster English language learning and better retention of the English language. Additionally, these field trips are scheduled at intervals where follow-up in class activities support and reinforce the main theme of the objective under study.

Click here to see some of the places that we have visited.

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