Reading Rockets ELL Webpage

I really enjoyed watching the videos on the website: http://www.readingrockets.org/atoz/english_language_learners .  Several of the videos were focused on the use of standards and how they should be addressed in the classroom and during meetings with fellow colleagues.  I agreed with what the principal was saying about the implementation of state standards in that until one surrounds oneself with the standards and has understood them thoroughly is the only way to successfully address standards.  At this point being a pre-teacher, I understand the standards, what they are, and what they mean, but I haven't yet had the chance to make the standards a fixture in my own classroom.  They are not all familiar to me, but they make sense and I understand how to use them.  While I am not in the classroom, I can take this opportunity to review the standards so they are much easier to reflect on once I begin student teaching.
I also liked hearing about the vertical comparison of the standards between grade levels as a strategy for teachers to become more in sync with benchmarks and expectations.  Kindergarten and first grade teachers compare standards, second and third grade teachers compare standards, etc.  Then the upper elementary school teachers discuss with the lower elementary school teachers points that they feel should be addressed that could help their students before they reach upper elementary school.  These could be certain comprehension strategies, organization strategies, an emphasis on common sense, or a wide variety of other things.
One of the video mentioned the Daily Language Review, when each day, the students are presented with a grammatically incorrect sentence and they are to fix the sentence or to identify what the grammatical issue is with the sentence.  The teacher mentioned that her ELLs, at the beginning of the year, did not make any corrections because the grammatical error took the form of the way they spoke, therefore, they didn't see the sentence as being incorrect.  By the end of the year, nearly all the students were able to read the sentence aloud and explain what made the sentence grammatically incorrect.  I really like this idea because while students are exploring the new language of English, seeing the structure of English could be a great strategy to students who are more structured or logical thinkers.  If they know the rules or if they understand when something sounds incorrect, the more likely they will correct their own speaking or writing.  I was lucky enough to witness this when my target student read a sentence to me that he had just written, but he realized that he had made a mistake.  He immediately picked up his pen and made the correction.