Lesson Planning for Language & Literacy
Happy 4 day Weekend Teachers of Emergent Bilinguals! Since my first post of the school year, I’ve taken you through the planning process – thinking about themes, topics and objectives, a scope and sequence, and assessments, and classroom routines for foundational literacy. Now it’s time to lesson plan for language and literacy!
Of course this is the most time consuming and laborious process. How should I start? Where do I find a text? Which pictures or video should I use? Lucky for you I have a new sample lesson!
Think of your week as an arc that moves your students from oral to written language.
Lesson planning for language and literacy means that we’re going to support students’ listening comprehension and speaking in the first part of the week, then transition them into reading and writing. With 180 minutes in the week, assuming you take all four periods to go through the whole lesson, your schedule would look something like this:
Period 1 Build Oral Language and Vocabulary
This is a “language day”. We introduce our topic, teach vocabulary, model spoken language, and have students practice listening and speaking. We can also show videos and do listening comprehension questions. For older students, however, it’s important to treat them as mature learners and incorporate some sort of writing task if they’re able, like including a sentence task with the help of a frame or a stem and a vocabulary word bank.
Period 2 Build Foundational Literacy Skills
Now we build the foundation. Whether this is the next day or a double period of Stand Alone, we must include explicit instruction of phonics or morphology. However, this early in the year students are not ready for this. We will go slowly, and give them more time to acquire vocabulary and develop comprehension.
Period 3 Read Aloud and respond to Text
We will read aloud a complex text to students that centers on our theme and topic. It doesn’t have to be long – actually a short paragraph is preferred! Students can analyze complex language in shorter chunks, and we can add on text as they get better and better. Students should learn to underline target vocabulary, and respond orally or in writing to comprehension questions.
An important point to make here is that this is not an ELA lesson! In fact, if you only wanted to spend 20 minutes on reading comprehension, that’s ok! The goal is Standard 2: determine the main idea of the text and summarize details. The text you choose should be complex enough that students have to think critically to understand, but not so complex that they become overwhelmed.
Period 4 Writing/Assessment
We would like to give older learners the chance to respond to text and demonstrate their knowledge in writing. This is the time when we will work on GRAMMAR IN CONTEXT: sentence structure, writing conventions like punctuation, and academic register.
Within each period, we need to take students through a standard progression of:
1. Warming-up and get ready for learning: eventually this will consist of a variety of options including alphabet warm-up, alphabetizing word sort, vocabulary picture matching, and phonics drills.
2. Reviewing and activate prior knowledge: your students will be prompted to think critically about what they may already know about a topic or what they discussed previously in class – activities include See Think Wonder, Journal Entry, Concept Mapping, Sentence Writing to describe a picture.
3. Building new knowledge: here you will be modeling new vocabulary/content knowledge, and/or a linguistic skill in the form of a phonics or morphology objective.
4. Participating in a guided practice: you will work together as a class and allow students to practice the new skills with you directly.
5. Demonstrating knowledge with an independent practice: Finally, you ask your students to work on the task independently. This allows you to assess whether they achieved the objective.
See my sample lesson on YouTube to see how it all goes together! Feel free to adjust this schedule to meet your needs – the only thing I ask is that you dedicate an entire period (or more) to teaching the oral language and linguistic skills: those are a priority over written skills right now.
Teachers, it’s Friday and let’s relax! Here’s a sample lesson for you to browse through for next week! Make a copy of it and make the slides your own!
Happy Rosh Hashanah!