My Online Readings
Saturday, February 04, 2012
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- 1Warm up
For this first lesson, it is best to focus on only the I, You, He/She/It structures which you can build upon in later classes. If students have not really done a lot of activities with the words he, she, and it, you may want to consider simply using names in the practice activities. Once you have determined what you would like to cover in the first lesson, use the warm up activity to review the vocabulary students will need later on in the lesson. A short simple drill activity would be ideal.
- 2Introduce Vocabulary
During the introduction section of your lesson, introduce any new vocabulary you plan to use in this lesson. Some emotions and adjectives would be good because students will then be able to form complete meaningful sentences. Introduce words such as happy and sad if students have not yet learned them. Use flashcards to drill vocabulary and have students complete some simple worksheet activities for further practice.
- 3Introduce “to be”
Show students how to make sentences such as “I am happy. You are happy. Jenny is happy.” Ensure that students understand how the subject and forms of the verb are paired. You can practice this before introducing the full sentence structure you would like students to learn. Call on students to make sentences choosing a subject, verb, and adjective from columns on the board. Without introducing the question form “Is she happy?” you can use such questions to test comprehension and students should understand what you are asking. Have them answer by saying “Yes, she is happy.” so that they continue to practice saying the target structure.
- 4Practice Simple
You can use worksheets for practice. Have students complete a fill in the blank exercise where they must choose am, is, or are to complete sentences to ensure that they understand which form of the verb agrees with certain subjects. You can also have students match sentences with images or with translations for practice and to test comprehension. As a class check the answers before continuing on.
- 5Practice Complex
Students can then complete an activity such as Battleship for further practice. You can adapt this classic game for use in the classroom. While it can be time consuming to explain, especially to beginners, your students will enjoy playing and it can be used to practice a wide variety of topics. To play Battleship students should work in pairs using a worksheet. For this class, the grids on the worksheet might have I, You, He, She, Jenny, Ms. Smith in the first column and happy, fun, from Korea, sad, silly, from America in the first row. Students then practice sentences such as “I am silly.” to try to locate and sink all of their opponents ships first. There may not be enough time in the first lesson to begin this activity but devoting the second lesson entirely to Battleship would give your students lots of speaking practice. For a third class, introduce the question that goes along with this target structure and have students play using the same worksheet but by making questions such as “Is Ms. Smith from America?” The really great thing about this activity is that students essentially have to speak in order to play whereas with board games students may be tempted to simply roll the dice and move their pieces around the board without really practicing English.
- 6Review
As a general review activity you can divide students into groups and play Hangman with sentences or words from their textbook. It is perhaps not appropriate to play the original game in your classroom so you can just adapt it so that no one actually hangs. One adaptation is to simply have a very large fish where when students guess incorrectly, a little fish gets closer and closer to being eaten. This is not very accurate as you can either draw the game out or end it whenever you choose. Another method of playing is to assign a point value to certain things. For example, if a group guesses the letter a and there are three in the sentence, the group would get three points. A correct guess of the entire sentence would be five points while there should be a penalty for guessing the entire phrase incorrectly but no penalty for guessing a letter that is not used. You can alter the scoring anyway you would like to make it more appropriate for your class.
How to Teach the Verb "To Be" to Beginners
The verb “to be” is the first verb students learn in their English studies.
It is used extensively in the English language and will allow students to create simple sentences with the vocabulary they have learned to date.
How To Proceed
Once your students are quite confident with making the sentences practiced in this lesson, you should include the plural we, you, they as well. As the first verb they study, “to be” is very important for your students and it is essential to get them to understand that the form of the verb is affected by the subject of the sentence. -
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- 1Warm up
Since students will mostly be sitting at their desks during a reading lesson, use the five to ten minute warm up period to get students moving and speaking. You are also going to want to generate some interest in your reading topic so that the warm up activity flows into your introduction of the material. One way to do this is to have students stand in a circle and ask them to tell you what they know about a certain topic. This can be as simple as giving you some related vocabulary. After a student has given you a word or phrase you can write it on the board and he can call on a student to go next. If appropriate you can bring a ball to class and ask students to gently toss it to the next person. This is good because it actually gives students something to focus on other than the words being written on the board which you will be able to review later.
- 2Introduce
Your introduction may have been made quite easy by the warm up activity. Now, while students are seated, ask them to use some of the vocabulary they came up with in sentences and add any key vocabulary to the list. Now you can distribute the reading passage and ask students to read it silently to become acquainted with the new material.
- 3Practice
Practice reading the material aloud. You can do this through a series of steps. First have students do some slash reading. You should read the passage aloud pausing where appropriate. Have students repeat each section after you and place slashes in their text. A sample sentence might look like this “For Christmas dinner / I ate ham, / mashed potatoes, / and green beans.//” This will help students read more naturally. Now you can have students read the passage by repeating sentences after you and then call on students to read one sentence at a time. If students struggle with the pronunciation of certain words, take this opportunity to practice pronouncing them too. You may wish to have students read the passage again silently to focus on its meaning before moving on.
- 4Practice MoreWith reading lessons it is important to ensure that students understand the material as well as any new words. To check vocabulary you can ask students to match synonyms, antonyms or pictures or ask them to complete sentences with the correct vocabulary words. To check overall comprehension, you can start with some true or false questions. Be sure to ask students why a particular statement is true or false when checking the answers. You can also have fill in the blank sentences or basic comprehension questions in this section.
- 5Produce
Prepare some discussion questions related to the reading and some that require students to use key phrases in their answers. For beginners, discussions will be quite challenging but intermediate and advanced students will gain a lot from discussing their thoughts and opinions. In smaller classes there will be more opportunities for students to share their viewpoints while with larger classes you may simply have to ask who agrees or disagrees with a particular statement and then call on three or four students to express their opinions.
- 6Review
Ask students to summarize the reading or what they learned in class. If you have not already done so, you can also have students search for the topic sentence and discuss why students chose certain sentences whether they chose correctly or not.
How To Teach A Perfect Reading Lesson<
While students certainly need practice reading material in English, it is important that you include short speaking, listening and writing activities whenever possible in your reading lessons. The focus of the lesson may be on reading a particular passage but having a diverse lesson plan will enable students who are good at other aspects of English to still participate and feel confident in their abilities while working to improve an area they are weaker at.
How To Proceed With Teaching Reading
Reading is a key part of learning English and these lessons give you an excellent opportunity to introduce topics of your own. Be careful when selecting an article. It is important that your students are interested in the material. They will be more active in the discussion if they feel strongly about a particular topic. -
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- 1Scanning
Scanning is used when looking for a specific piece of information in a given text. When a student scans, he looks over the selection quickly to locate the particular piece of information he needs and reads only that information, but carefully. Once he finds this information, he stops reading. The reading passage could be a selection on a test with reading comprehension questions, but it may also simply be reading a schedule to see when a particular movie is playing or checking a weather map in a newspaper. Scanning is a fast form of reading that does not pay attention to every detail given in the text. Before students can scan for the answer to their questions, they should think about what form the answers will take. Will they be a time? Will they be a location? Knowing this beforehand will assist students in locating the information quickly.
- 2Skimming
Skimming, like scanning, is a quick type of reading. Unlike scanning, though, the goal of skimming is to learn the main points in a larger selection of writing rather than answer one specific question. When you skim milk, you take the richest part off the top. Likewise, when your students skim a reading passage, they should be pulling all the most essential information out of a piece. The most straightforward way to skim a given passage is to read the entire first paragraph, the entire last paragraph and read the first sentence of each additional paragraph in between. In so doing, your students should be able to identify the major themes throughout the passage. Students should also pay attention to italicized or bold words, headings and subheadings. After skimming a passage, students can then decide whether to go back and read the entire selection or to scan for particular information. Skimming can be a difficult activity for ESL students as they often get bogged down by new vocabulary and confusing grammar. Reassure your students that when they skim a passage, they only need to get the author’s primary points. Encourage them to guess at any new vocabulary they come across and not to worry about the details.
- 3Reading for Detail
Careful reading or reading for detail is probably the most commonly used reading strategy. This is a slower reading process that starts at the beginning of a passage and proceeds to the end. When reading for detail, students should read every sentence, but they should not try to know the exact meaning of each word. Even native speakers infer the meaning of unknown words as they read. Reassure your students that even when reading for information, they do not need to know every word on the page but should try and guess its meaning from the context, a valuable skill in and of itself. If students put too much pressure on themselves when it comes to new vocabulary, the dictionary may become more of a burden than a blessing. When reading for detail, students should aim to understand about eighty percent of the information they read. If they need an answer to a particular question that they may have missed, they can always go back and scan for it.
3 Most Essential Reading Skills Your Students Need
Reading is so much more than starting with the first word on the page and moving along each line till you get to the end.
Reading is an essential skill for academic success, and we all know how important it is. We wouldn’t spend the time we do teaching it if we didn’t value reading. Even though reading is so essential, we often overlook the fundamental reading skills that our students need. Reading isn’t just about going from the beginning to the end of a written passage. There are different reading strategies to use for different informational outcomes.
Here are three strategies your students should learn to give them full academic success.
Three Quintessential Reading Strategies
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