Module 6 Unit 3 Activity 3
Subject: English (ELL)
Grade: 8th Grade
Teacher: Simon Elias
School: Saint James College
Classroom: 26 students, all Korean and the ratio of the students were 14 girls to 12 boys.
Lesson Objective: Students will be able to identify and order food in a variety of restaurant settings.
Lesson Structure:
- Recap of previous lessons
- Introduction of the lesson objectives
- Mini-Lesson on restaurant word definitions and examples
- Group Activity
- Review
Teaching Strategies:
Simon starts with an oral review to keep students’ previous lessons fresh in their mind and writes bullet points on the board with the chapter’s lessons. For example he will say that things like collecting stamps and playing the piano are examples of, and the students will respond by saying “hobbies”. Then he will write hobbies on the board. He covers everything they have learned from the beginning of the semester until today’s topic.
Afterwards, Simon will introduce the objectives for the day’s lesson and then let the students know the order of the day’s lesson. He starts the lesson with an oral probe to see how much the students know about the different restaurant settings and kinds of foods such as appetizers, main dishes, and desserts,etc.
Then he starts the mini-lesson where he explains the vocabulary and the different sentences used when ordering at a restaurant. The students are put into group of five and one group of six and the lesson becomes authentic learning. One person is the waiter in each group and Simon has brought real menus from five different types of restaurants. Each group rotates tables after they have ordered from the waiter and each time another student has a turn to become the waiter. This was a very interactive activity and the students really responded to this lesson.
It was a great way to engage students and helps kinesthetic learners and he gets to check each table and help all of the students at one point. The teacher uses the lights to get the students attention at the end of the activity and he uses high and low order questions to review and check for understanding at the end of the lesson.
Formative Assessment:
Simon quizzed the students in the review session at the beginning of the class by asking questions to identify the different lessons that were learned previously. He used think alouds and targeted students asking them higher or lower order questions depending on their English level.
After the mini-lesson the got the students to put their heads down and observed the thumbs up, middle or down, to check for understanding.
During the class activity, Simon observed each group listening and becoming the “second waiter” challenging the students with question variations and also checking for understanding by asking students particular questions about their food when they were ordering. He would ask more challenging questions to those students who were higher level and helped.
When the activity was done, he reviewed the activity and used a metacognitive formative assessment so that the students could think about the lesson in an authentic manner. He ask the students how they could apply what they have learned, why it was important, and answered any questions or curiosities that the students had.
Finally he ended with assigning the students homework from their book which they had to bring for the next class. This homework will check if the students understood the vocabulary and the different sentences used in restaurant settings.
The students were at one point getting very loud and some of the students especially higher level students were doing most of the talking in the groups so Simon would come around and direct questions to the students who were speaking less. Also I noticed one student raised their hand at the other side of the classroom, but since he was going from group to group in order by the time he got to the third group, the student had already either found the answer, or decided not to ask the teacher.
Recommendations:
Simon is a very experienced teacher and I always learn so much from him, either watching him or getting advice or ideas from his lesson. In one of this week’s particular class, because Simon was going from group to group in a left or right order in the classroom, he failed to answer perhaps a very important question for his student. Maybe having a structure to be able to reach all his students was great, but also being flexible is important as by the time he got there her question was unanswered or perhaps she felt as she was being ignored. He could quickly go over help the student and then go back to the order of the tables that he was following. Overall the lesson and the activity went very well and the students were genuinely engaged in the activity. Making it truly authentic really helped make the lesson not just a memorization setting, but at actual experience that the students will remember.
