Day Three - Teaching Grades 7 and 8

We were asked to teach a lesson for grade 7 and grade 8.

The first lesson was on the language used in notices. It was quite a challenge to prepare that lesson as the language in the samples of the notices in the children’s books was exceedingly complex for the English level of these students. It was also difficult because some of the examples were not culturally relevant. This time, we decided to use readily available materials (paper and markers) and to use the student book as our main resource for planning and implementing our lesson. Our lesson plan was very simple and consisted of only two parts: First, a whole class discussion of notices and their components with a whole class practice on understanding them and second a small group practice of different notices. Although challenging, some of the students seem to be able to extrapolate the main information of the notices that they were working on after few prompts. Our goal for Mr. Farzan and Mr. Anzar was for them to observe how they can plan a lesson using their own book (no extra resources needed), integrate whole class and small group work and use small group time to attend to every student, especially those struggling ones.

The second lesson was on contractions (he is = he’s). Again, we kept the lesson plan simple, requiring minimal materials (sheets of paper and pebbles collected from the school grounds) and consisting of only one whole class mini-lesson and a small group activity. In addition, we used hand gestures throughout the lesson to visually describe the concept of a contraction. The small group activity was simple, a game of Bingo, that included both a receptive and expressive component. In this lesson, we emphasized the power of small group activities: they allow for peer learning and afford teachers the opportunity to attend all students, particularly those who need additional teacher input.