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Certification Program



Guidelines
Format

The Current Phase:
Lesson planning for some teachers is the most tedious part of teaching. However experienced teachers are of the opinion that the more detailed a plan the smoother is the execution of that plan. In this phase the important parts of a lesson and how to write effective lesson plans are dealt with.

Phase 5 - Lesson Planning


Lesson Plan

A good lesson needs good planning. Your lesson plans ensure that several things happen in your lesson:

Six of the strongest reasons as to why you should create an ESL lesson plan to make your classes a success.


1. You have a definite language point to teach. Your lesson plan should be based around one language point.
2. What games and activities you are going to use. Certain activities work for some language points, but not others. Make sure your games are also age/level appropriate.
3. Your ESL lesson should have a purpose, it should keep building. Your students will be lost if your lesson jumps from here to there as they won't be able to follow where you are going.
4. A lesson plan acts as a warning against possible difficulties in teaching the new language, such as pronunciation. Because you have your lesson plan, you can allocate extra time or find great activity that helps to overcome the problem.
5. Creating lesson plans saves you time. Because you will likely teach the same lesson more than once, you can use your lesson plan over and over again.
6. Using lesson plans generally mean that you are following the same pattern for all your lessons. This helps to let your students know what's coming next, so they can focus more or learning and not what is going to happen next.


What to include in a successful lesson plan

Ok, so, you?ve decided that creating a lesson plan for your classes is a good idea. Now what? A lesson plan can't include just about anything – it basically tells you what to teach and how to do it!

Following three steps are mandatory

  • Objective: What to achieve
  • Aids: To facilitate teaching. For example: flash cards, worksheets, songs, poems and black board are a few aids that are effective.
  • Time: The time frame has to be kept in mind while doing any activity


Also the above three steps are pointless without the four essential elements that are never left out of a good lesson plan:

  • a warmer
  • new language
  • review
  • and fun!..


Warmer – A warmer is so important because it sets the mood for the rest of the lesson. Warmers are essential because they help your students:

  • To relax and feel comfortable in the classroom
  • Have fun
  • Realize that “everyone is in the same boat”
  • Learn a little about you and their classmates
  • Gain confidence
  • Get a feel of how the rest of the class will be like

New Language – This is what your lesson plan is based around and will take up the majority of the lesson. Introducing new language follows three main steps:

  • Introduction – This is where you explain the new language. It's important that you try to elicit as much of the language as possible.
  • Practice – This is where the language is “drilled” into the students through repetition. This step contains teacher controlled drills.
  • Application – This is where students now get to use the language they've just learnt in a fun and interesting way. This activity should allow as much student to student interaction as possible.

In summary, a new language should:

  • Be introduced with a concept that the students will understand and without, where possible, referring to the written word.
  • Be elicited from the students, where possible.
  • Follow a structured presentation method so that your students can follow where you are going. Allow for as much student to student interactivity as possible.


Review/follow up
– helps your students to retain the language they learnt in the last lesson. Essentially it should be:

  • Fun
  • Short (roughly 5-10 minutes, depending on how long your lesson is)
  • As student orientated as possible, i.e. the teacher should have minimal involvement.
  • In your follow-up activity the students should be in the driver's seat.

Fun – Although not an actual “step” in your lesson plan, fun should be incorporated in as much of the lesson as possible. Here's why:

  • Your students will show a greater willingness to learn if they are having fun.
  • Your students will be better behaved because they are not bored.
  • Greater participation leads to greater language retention, which makes you look better!
  • Better word of mouth - the more fun your lessons are, the more likely word will spread about how great a teacher you are!

These are the core of your lesson plan. In the next section we?ll take a look at some great tips to enhance your lessons.

We can divide lesson planning into three stages:

  • Long term – for the whole term.
  • Short term – for a unit of work
  • One class – for individual lesson

Long term planning:

1. The planning begins either at the beginning or the end of the term .
2. The contents or the text can be changed or the order can be altered if needed.
3. The activities, topics , subjects taught should be common to al teachers.
4. Materials to be used can also be planned and prepared.
5. Sample of a Long term lesson plan without a book:


Age 3 to 6

Term 1
Class
Period per week: 3
Total no. of classes:
Month
January
February
March
Topic to be covered
My school
My Teacher
The body
My friend
My birthday
Food
My parents
My calendar
Clothes


Short term planning:

  • Short term planning may be a plan for one week, one unit or one topic.

  • Decide what language item you are going to teach and how you are going to teach.

  • Evaluation is a part of teaching, so write evaluation into your plan at this stage.

  • Remember the plan is a rough guide to show where you are going and what you hope to cover.


Age 10 to 12 years

Sample of a short term lesson plan:

Week Date:
Level:
No of classes:
Language Topic:
Language Structure
Method and Aids Used
Activities
Remarks
4 weeks
Beginners
12
Expressing about Cartoon Characters
Favourite phrases
by the characters
Audio Visual Clips , comic strips
One act play , pair interview with the super hero
Comments on whether objectives were met. if not then reasons

Taking your lessons to the next level.
In this section we?ll take a look at ways that you can improve you basic lesson plan. These tips can help your good lessons become great lessons! These tips, by themselves, cannot make a lesson plan. You should always use the steps outlined in the previous section to build the foundation of your lesson plan, these tips are like the sizzle to the sausage!
There are several considerations to take into account when developing your lesson content. Here are the main things that you should consider:

  • Age – How old are your students? Are your activities appropriate for the age that you are teaching?
  • Ability/level – What do your students already know? Are you building a foundation of knowledge or just teaching a bit from here and there?
  • Classroom environment – What resources are available to you? How many students are there? How big is the classroom? Can you take the students outside if you need to?
  • Sensitive topics – Be aware that as it is most likely that you will be teaching to students from a different culture to your own, they may have different values and beliefs to you.

To build a lesson plan we need to know about lesson framework

Lesson Frameworks
Lesson frameworks are lesson sequences that can be built on and modified as appropriate for different classes. They are a sequence of behaviors and choreographies that work as a stand-alone lesson, although they are not intended as a prescription. They are intended to meet the following criteria:

  • Language presented in contexts meaningful to the students
  • Modeling to controlled practice to more communicative practice activity
  • Variation in the modeling and practice activity
  • Remodeling target language in different modes – spoken dialogues, listening, reading
  • Building on core materials – i.e. minimal vocabulary initially, expanded as the lesson progresses
  • Maximizing student to student interaction
  • Modeling language first as audio input and then as reading
  • Integrated skills development – listening, speaking, reading & writing
  • Grammar in context as focus upon form, or highlighting grammatical features

Lesson frameworks are hardly a new idea, and are basically what are found in most classroom texts. They are a suggestion, but a suggestion inviting modification and adaptation to meet the needs of the teacher, the students and the curriculum in any given situation.

To some extent, lesson frameworks plus the lesson contexts found in this book are an alternative to a textbook. It would be possible for the teacher, and possibly the students, to construct their own text choosing the contexts and frameworks that best suited their purposes. This not a novel idea, and might provide a feasible alternative for classes who find commercial texts difficult to adapt to their needs.

The frameworks are presented as a minimal lesson plan that includes a column for the “ target language,” and a column for “process.

Language
Process
This column will define the target language either as written or as a reference to a page in a text. Obviously, the target language is a `sample' to make the lesson sequence and process clear. The teacher must substitute the appropriate language for their students
Process will be a brief sequence of steps for teaching the target language. These are suggested steps and might be varied or modified according to the teacher's and the students? needs.

Few examples of effective aids that one can use in a lesson plan
• Games
• Worksheets

Why use games? Besides being fun, why is it a good idea to use games?

• They provide a lot a language repetition.
• They help to consolidate language points/vocabulary

However, not all games are good for all classes, when choosing games you should consider:

• Age/level appropriateness – Will the students be able to understand the game and even enjoy it?
• Safety – Don?t risk your student?s safety for the sake of a fun lesson.

• Number of students – Some games only work with a certain number of students

Why should you use worksheets in the classroom?

• Worksheets help to consolidate learning as well as providing an opportunity for student to student interactivity.
• They can also help you gauge how well a student is doing as you never know what kind of “help” they?ve received at home with their homework.

Does it flow?

• The whole point of a lesson plan is so that at any point in your lesson you can quickly glance at where you're up to and know what's coming up next. If you can't make sense of it, then you've wasted your time on a worthless lesson plan and possibly the student's time by planning a poor lesson.
• Lesson plans take the guess work out of calculating the length of your lessons. This allows you to include as much of the content as you had intended

  Sample lesson plans

 

A day at the beach
Age level : 8 to 10 years (beginners)
Objective
: Vocabulary expansion , recognition of phonics, speaking skills
Aids : Song , Flash cards , Sea shells , role play .

Lesson 1: Introduction to the beach
Vocabulary Taught: wave, ocean, sand, sand castle, sea-shell, beach
Phonics taught: s-a-n-d,s-h-e-l-ls,c-r-a-b-s,w-a-v-e-s,b-e-a-c-h-
Aids: Flashcards, sea shells (if available), paint (if you are going to use the “Sea
Shells” activity), “Ice-cream song” if desired, paper for drawing your family at the beach.
Time: About an hour, depending on class size.
Activity: Paint Sea Shells or Draw your family at the beach with family members
Possible sentence structures for this lesson:
1. What is it? It's a sea shell.
Warmer: Ice-cream song/any song related to the beach

Duration : 5minutes

Objective :

• To set the context
• To make learning fun

Introduction: 10 minutes

Objective :

• Introduce and drill the new vocabulary.

Procedure :

• Use a big picture of a beach and introduce and drill the new vocabulary.
• Get the students to draw each part of the beach according to the words pointed out by the teacher.

• Get the students to hold up their pictures and encourage them to say two sentences about it .


Follow up activity: 20 minutes.

• Today's activity: Painting Sea shells or draw your family at the beach. If you have sea shells, or you can get them easily, children usually enjoy painting sea shells. It gives them something that they can touch and take home at the end of the day.
• If you don't have any sea shells then get your students to draw a picture of
themselves, their friends and their family at the beach.
Phonics: 5 minutes s-a-n-d: Drill phonic values.

Fun activity: 5-7 minutes Themes – give the students a theme and play
The animals theme always works well


Frame work of a lesson plan

Teacher:
Lesson no.
Duration: Level:
No. of students:
Date:

Topic: Context

Final Objective: What will they be able to do at the end…………. How……..and about what.

Qualifying Objectives: What will they be able to do during or at the end of each stage of the lesson.
1.
2.
3…..

Aids or materials used:


Vocabulary taught:

Time Taken

Teacher’s Activity Students’ Activity Anticipated Difficulties



Assignment

1. Read the following statements:
Teacher 1: “I plan my lesson in great details before I enter the class and adhere to it”
Teacher 2: “I walk in to the class and do what my students need to do.”

Which statement do you agree with? Why? (70 words)

2. Label the following as „aims" and „activities":
o Speak about their weekend to another student.
o Generate interest in the topic.
o Complete the text by filling in the gaps.
o Reading for specific information.
o Integrate listening and speaking.
o Look at picture prompts and repeat using the present continuous.

3. Use the above format to write one sample lesson plan.

 



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