Non-english speaking student
I have a new student who knows no English.
She is a year 5 and speaks Spanish.
I would love some advice on how I can best support her. She is observant and often follows her classmates' lead, her classmates are helpful towards her and I try to make her feel welcome. I do wellbeing check ins with her and students are making an effort to eat with her and play with her in the yard.
In class, I often need to take pause during teaching to translate the most important info for her. I don't like that I have to use my phone for this, I prefer to have my phone put away. She recently brought in an iPad but it can't connect to our wifi, so I had to hotspot and download language libraries (then remove my hotspot) so she can use her iPad to communicate.
I feel very limited in what I can teach her, I often circle back to her and clarify instructions, but she usually doesn't get it until much later and has a slow start on tasks, by then we've moved on. Especially in Maths, since there are a lot of open ended problem solving based tasks that require critical thinking. It feels very convoluted/difficult to explain over text translation. I'm trying to find a balance between helping her, supporting my class and teaching the lesson.
If anyone has advice on how I can support this student, I would appreciate it.