What do you do when you are for the first time in front of your new Year 6 class, and you realise that, whereas some pupils understand something, the majority of them don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about?
Well, what I did was starting with classroom expressions, greetings, and not least with present vs. past simple. Though it could’ve been more logical to begin with present simple vs. continuous, I sticked to the first approach.
After the first lessons it was crystal clear to me that my group was THE MIXED-ABILITIES GROUP. So, I had to work with symbols, images, animations and differentiated tasks in order to reach most of the students.
Lily and Ermine, a short animation found on Teachers TV , seemed to suit my purposes.
I wrote the story to it, and divided it into 5 parts. The first two parts were the subject of a cooperative learning arranged lesson, with differentiated tasks within the groups.
Next lesson I re-showed the first two parts of the video, and let the pupils complete after-watching activities (and past simple revision exercices).
- Lily and Ermine after-watching and past simple WS
- Lily and Ermine after-watching and past simple WS (answers)
After that I realised that I was in an acute need of a third level of differentiation. So, for the following lesson I split the rest of the video into three clips, each one with the corresponding worksheet.
In conclusion, the lesson plan based on the animation Lily and Ermine proved to be very engaging for my pupils, what provided me with an incentive to invest “a bit” of work in creating these materials.
The cold season is still in charge so why not using this little winter story for your English classes?
Hi.
I loved your idea. Definitely the students will get more motivated on learning texts. Thanks for sharing that and if you don’t mind, I’d like to know a bit more about your lesson plan for this class. As the use of Animation for learning English texts (as a foreign language) is the topic of my final paper. I’d be very grateful if you could tell me more about this LP you did.
So, did this LP ask for 3 classes? Did the students work all the time in small groups? How many students for each group?
Thanks in advance.
Best Regards,
Cynthia Danielle.
I agree, using this kind of technique will surely give students some fun time learning.. Thanks for sharing.
Hi, Bogdan. Thank you for sharing such a great activity. I’m going to use it right away in my efl classroom.