Teaching English in Korea - ESL blog

Baby animals lesson idea

1. Over view of the lesson
ㅇ.The title of lesson: Baby animals
ㅇ Content: Grammar: be-verb matching with subject
ㅇ Vocabulary: piglet, kitten, calf, duckling, kid
ㅇ Objectives: By the end of the lesson, students should be able to identity 5 baby animals and speak according to the picture without teacher’s assistance.
ㅇ. Controlled Activity: Word Maze Activity
The teacher gives students a word maze board. Several members are in one group. One of them reads the words which are the target vocabulary items or the day and others draw a line according to reading. After finishing, next child reads and the others draw a line with different color crayon, they do repeatedly until each group member finish reading in order.
ㅇ. Less controlled Activity: A dice activity
The teacher gives a dice which has baby animal pictures on each facet, for each group. Several members are in a group. One of them throws the dice, and then others ask “What is this? What are these? The thrower answers according to the question. For example, these are duckling or this is a kitten.

2. Theoretical justification on the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
The right hemisphere controls emotional, nonverbal, intuitive and sensory function. When we teach a language, as we use the Right hemisphere participation, we can teach a language effectively. Visuals are used in the controlled and less controlled activities, so those visuals stimulate students’ right brain. That makes meaningful context for the learners.
B. The affective Filler, anxiety, and motivation
According to Krashen, there are two factors for succeeding in a language, the one is comprehensible Input, and the other is low affective filter. In this lesson plan, students do two group work activities which are easy and interesting. When they do first activity, they do not need to worry about errors. Even though at first time, they don’t know the exact pronunciation of baby animals, they can ask to their group members, listen repeatedly and correct the errors without anxiety. The second activity is also similar, as they play a dice game they do not need that they are learning a language. They acquire a language expression without conscious effort just through play. So this lesson is designed with low affective Filler and low anxiety, nevertheless most children like to play a game.
C. Input and Output
Krashen said that when there are much roughly tuned input (caregiver speech, teachers’ talk and foreigner’s talk), if they can understand the content, the learners can acquire i+1 easily. In this lesson the learners can get much roughly tuned Input from their friend while doing two activities. Swain said that when the learners produce the output, they realize the gap between what they know and what they can produce. In this lesson there is much student’s language production, so they can perceive their real ability.
3. Conclusion
As a teacher, when I design a lesson plan, I have to consider the students’ participation. It must elicit students’ participation through interesting activity. As I used various materials which attract students’ interesting, it was always more effective and activated their schema. When there was group work, they participated in class actively and produced much output. The output also can be Input for other students.

Submitted by Hyeon