The lesson below is based on a couple lessons I have done over the past year. The school I currently am working in is a Chinese/English bilingual school. I have a couple of Cantonese speakers, Germans, a Japanese girl, and a couple of Mandarin speakers. The non-Chinese students that came in started with no English and no Chinese. As a result of these demographics I have focused largely on providing students a starting place with their language mainly through vocabulary and its application in the four macro-skills- speaking, listening, reading and writing.
With the introduction of iPad’s in the classroom I have been able to provide students with vocabulary to things they already knew about. All my students have iPads at home; they knew how to swipe, go to the home page, take pictures, delete, and move from one app to another. Through demonstration and the introduction of basic iPad vocabulary they were able to come away with authentic meaningful words that could be used while receiving and listening to instructions.
The creation of books with the seasons as topics has provided the students another way to acquire vocabulary through their own lenses. They take pictures and videos of what they perceive as vocabulary that may or may not apply to the topic and bring it back to class. We go through the pictures and I introduce the words they didn’t know but wanted to know so they could express their ideas in English. The bookshelf below provide a glimpse of some of what we’ve done with our time together.
The lesson is a more formalized process of what we do. My lesson plans don’t typically involve this much detail but the process of reflecting why we are learning what we are learning and the other aspects of UBD such as empathizing and self-knowledge is something I’m only starting to incorporate and reflect on. Enjoy!
