Lesson Plans

As with the listening and speaking plans, these are brief note/outline format plans of everything I do with the students, in the order I do it. I provided links to all of the supplemental games/activities, videos, websites, and other resources I use. I like to start lessons out with some type of discussion question or interesting fact set related to the theme. Even though speaking isn’t our primary focus, I like to incorporate as much spontaneous speech practice as possible so students have the opportunity to use and build context for the vocabulary they are learning. The discussion also helps to activate prior knowledge and increases student comprehension of the readings.

Another thing to note about these plans is that they are almost exclusively for the reading sections of the book. The schools I’ve taught at have a separate class for grammar and writing so I didn’t deal with that part of each unit. I do briefly go over and practice most of the grammar, but I never take the time for a full writing lesson. Quite honestly, I don’t know how I’d fit it in if I had to, four hours of class time isn’t enough to do everything I would like with just the readings. The students are always highly engaged and we have a lot of great discussion about each one.

Digital Vocabulary Glossary

While writing is primarily covered in another class, vocabulary is one of the primary focuses of these classes at our school. In fact, though I’ve created digital vocabulary glossaries for the listening and speaking books, the reason I started making them was for the reading classes. These glossaries work exactly like the ones I shared about last week (check the linked post for all the details), only the words are different. My students are often overwhelmed by the amount of vocabulary these courses cover, but the glossaries help them to feel a little more confident. The glossaries, in combination with a heavy focus on context clue skills (we practice them every unit), have made a big difference for my students and by the end of the semester their skills have really grown!

The Links

Unfortunately, that’s it for now. As I said, I haven’t had as much opportunity to teach these books, thus I have yet to create review menus and other curriculum-specific resources for them. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity sometime in the future. For now, here are the links to download your free copies of the lesson plans and vocabulary glossaries. Happy teaching, everyone!