**UPDATE**
Sophia Chen graciously adapted this lesson to Chinese!
Click here for a copy. Don’t you just love how beautiful Chinese characters are???
Tam Wilson adapted this lesson to French!
Click here for a copy. THANK YOU @MmeTamWilson for your generosity!
If you have adapted any of my free lessons to another language, please share back with me so I can add it to the blog post. The more we share, that easier it is on EVERYONE!!!
How in the world is it possible that I’m already planning my first week of lessons? It literally feels like summer just started. LITERALLY. What am I going to do this year to hook my amazing students?
Hatching a plan.
At at our recent Southern Indiana Teaching with Comprehensible Input PLC (professional learning community), my amazing friend Abby Whicker shared this commercial that she likes to use to kick the year off:
Perfect, right? It has a funny, quirky, and totally unexpected ending – the trifecta for compelling content. As soon as she showed us this commercial, I immediately began hatching my plan (insert evil grin, mwahahaha!). What better way to introduce the WHY? Why do we bother to acquire more than one language? It’s the perfect següe into my continuous spiel on hoe second language acquisition is-NOT-like-any-other-subject-and-must-be-acquired-rather-than-taught-explicitly. The bonus? This little lesson allows me to build relationships and teach for a week IN SPANISH before we have to break into English to cover the mandated syllabus requirements.
Building the lesson.
We have a staggered start again this year. Monday and Tuesday, the first half of the alphabet will be at school, Wednesday and Thursday the second half will attend, and Friday we get to all be together for the first time.
Added to that is a completely new bell schedule. We have a total of 9 class periods this year! The beautiful thing about this schedule is that everyone, EVERYONE has enrichment during 4th period. That means I can write a pass to a student who is missing an assignment and they can come to me during 4th period to make it up. I love, love, love this plan. So much easier for me to provide however many opportunities my students need to show me what they CAN do!
With pros there are always cons and the downside to this schedule is that our class periods are cut to an extremely short 43 minutes with a four-minute passing period. Holy cowgirl! I can tell you from experience, walking at a moderate pace, you cannot go from the gym to my classroom (and stop at your locker, or the bathroom… or even the drinking fountain!) in four minutes. Sheesh! But it is something we will deal with. Taking all of this into account, I plan to start my lessons each day with a Focused Attention Practice. A breathing focused, calming moment to start our time together so we can be present and ready. Will I have bell ringers? Not likely. FAP‘s ARE my bell ringers this year. With so much change and switching going on throughout the day, we need a moment during each class where we can clear our heads. I’m willing to bet that FAP’s will pay off on a much larger scale than a traditional bell ringer.
Delivering the lesson.
I love how I set this lesson up because days one and two are input oriented with listening (Movie Talk) and reading (Embedded Reading of the Movie Talk). Day three (Friday) is an incredibly FUN game from my dear friend AnneMarie Chase: The Lucky Reading Game! Students will get to experience the meat and potatoes of my classes right away:
Step 1: Establish meaning.
Step 2: Provide input.
Step 3: More input.
Step 4: Even more input.
Step 5: Have fun and connect with the content!
Step 6: Produce something.
This is my basic cycle for every lesson. There are myriad ways to deliver these steps, but the pillars are always the same.
Sharing means caring.
Because I am not at all convinced we are totally out of the COVID-19 woods and because I know from my own experience that teachers as a whole are NOT ready to re-enter the classroom, I am continuing to share my resources free of charge.
- I just ask that you give credit where credit is due and
- Help a girl out when you find errors. I am far from perfect and would love for you to help me correct any of my errors.
- Lastly, if you create something based off of any of my resources, please share back with the gang so we can all benefit from your creativity!
Just click here for your own copy of The Fish. The lesson includes:
- Learning Targets (you can download your own copy here.)
- Screenshots in case you would rather do a Clip Chat than a Movie Talk.
- Instruction slides.
- A list of possible questions for the Movie Talk of the commercial.
- An Embedded Reading.
- A ready-to-print, cut, and tape up Running Dictation.
- A link to instructions for AnneMarie Chase’s Lucky Reading Game (and yes, I DID purchase the giant playing cards to make it even MORE fun!)
- A ready-made story to recycle the input and use with the Luky Reading Game.
Enjoy those last precious moments before you hit the grindstone again. And remember to be kind to yourself and revel in the process, not strive for perfection.
Happy teaching, friends, it’s…
If you teach high school, I would be very cautious using "fap" around them. Check out Urban Dictionary and maybe reconsider a new acronym ��
Ha! Good idea!
And that makes my comment about FAP's being my bell ringers pretty racy, eh? lol 🙂