One of the many challenges that teachers face in mathematics classrooms is determining how much of the verbal and written explanations help students accomplish instructional goals. The challenge is greater in linguistically diverse classrooms because the explanations and multiple representations are not perceived uniformly by all students. Recent research on the impact of gestures supplies evidence that students whose primary language is different from the language of instruction benefit from supporting oral and written explanations with the use of gestures that model mathematical objects and/or processes. In this article, the authors visit two classrooms that reveal some effective teaching practices for linguistically diverse populations of students. The first classroom illustrates how using gestures and making well-founded pedagogical choices can help in correcting students' misconceptions concerning the attributes of an object. The second classroom illustrates how the use of students' own bilingual skills supports discourse and understanding.