Shyaonti Talwar | ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, PEDAGOGY, CRITICAL THINKING, CREATIVITY AND PERFORMING ARTS.

Lesson Plan for Young Learners

Lesson aim

To familiarise young learners to the word family of animals.

Sub aims

To enable integrated use of the thematic list and the grammar words (verbs) in order to describe qualities of animals through freer practice.

To allow the practice of the cognitive skills of reasoning and justifying.

Target group: 6-7 year olds.

Teaching aid: miniature plastic animals.

Procedure

1. Bring miniature plastic animals to class.
2. Distribute them among children.
3. Give children turns to call out the name of the animal they are holding.
4. Ask children to get into groups according to the animal each child has.
5. Monitor them while they are at it.
6. Nominate children to give their reasons for being in a particular group. Encourage them to say: I have a horse and I am in this group because all the other animals in this groups run very fast/because they have four legs and can run/because they do not crawl or swim/because they eat grass.
7. Allow each child to justify their choice of the group.

Reflections

Through an activity like this, the teacher is accomplishing several objectives:
1. She is encouraging learner autonomy. Learners are made to feel responsible. They decide on their own and get into groups on their own accord.
2. She is facilitating communication. Learners need to talk to one another to figure out who is part of which group and why. They need to discuss qualities of animals and understand common characteristics to decide which group to be in.
3. In the course of the grouping they will agree, disagree, give opinions and make suggestions.
4. The teacher will also come to know if they know the meaning of the action words like jump, walk, run, etc. So it is also a kind of concept check activity carried out by the teacher for her to test the learners’ previous knowledge and plan her teaching. Concept check activities or questions are activities that are set up and conducted to check whether the learners have understood the concept or the meaning of the input delivered.

Suggested extension activities focusing on other aspects of learning vocabulary

Spelling

1. Each learner is asked to come up with their respective animal and dictate the spelling of the animal to the other learners who write it down in their notebooks.

Learners are given jumbled words which they have to unjumble which are the names of the various animals that were taught to them.