TPE 7: Teaching English Learners
_Lesson Plan: The Planets
Lesson Summary— This is a lesson designed for third grade science. Outside on the black-top, student teams will be assigned to be different planets and given signs and a costume to help represent their planet. They will walk on the chalked outline of their orbit and record how many times they can “orbit” the sun in 1 minute. Each time they walk around the sun they grow a year older. I believe that this lesson exemplifies my ability to plan for English language learners (ELL) for a number of reasons. Realia— Firstly, I give the students realia to represent facts about the planets. The realia will be labeled according to what feature I want them to notice. For instance, Mercury is a planet made of iron. The only iron realia I could find was a horseshoe. While I could label it 'horseshoe', I think it's more pertinent to the lesson if I tag it with the word 'iron'. Realia with labels help ELLs learn key vocabulary and helps make the content more concrete. Repetition— Secondly, the independent practice in this lesson is in fact, not independent practice but a small group activity. My ELLs will not only see my model of the activity, will not only see my student volunteers modeling but will also see their groupmates' participation during the activity. This level of repetition will help visually answer any procedural questions they might have. Visual Orientation— Thirdly, at the start of the lesson I show a video. While the words in the music video are extremely fast, it does have subtitles. Even if the words are incomprehensible, an advantage to the video is that it visually orientates the student to the general topic we're addressing: the planets in our solar system. Scaffolding— Furthermore, during the activity, the data sheet I provide gives additional support and shows how I expect them to record their data. To top it off, the assessment I'm using allows my ELLs who struggle with writing to define orbit and show competency by drawing a picture. Reflection—I have presented this lesson to adults. They loved the costumes and realia to denote their roles. Though the adults understood the task with only a few questions, I felt that I would need to concentrate on improving my modeling for an audience of third graders. |