Friday 17 July 2020

A typical lesson sequence: Introduction stage (Modelling)

never plan individual lessons but sequence of lessons. Advantage, sometimes I can plan up to 6 lessons in one go! Disadvantage, it can be time consuming if you teach from Y7 to Y13! 


When I teach, I always use Smartboard (Notebook 11) Software and I plan nearly a whole topic with as many slides as possible. I personally do not like PPT as it is too lineal for me, although it has its values and it can be good for some games. On my Notebook, I insert all links to all tools I will be using throughout the teaching of a particular topic: from TaskMagic (I will dedicate an entry to this wonderful tool as it is really undervalued) to Wheelofnames, Flippity to Quizziz. I can end up with up to 50 slides for a particular topic.  

My Notebooks include all activities covering teaching/learning stages: Introduction of chunks, controlled production/practice and free production or spontaneity.  On this entry I am going to concentrate on the Introduction/Modelling of a given corpus of Sentence Builders (SBs).This is a typical sequence:

I introduce/model SBs on my Interactive Whiteboard, using my Notebook (below an example of a SB for the topic of Holidays (Y10 low ability group). Students also get a printed copy of this. I do not introduce all this corpus in one lesson but two or even three/four lessons: less is more! as it is important to avoid cognitive load.

In this particular example, I introduced reasons in a third lesson as I spent two lessons introducing the activities and practising the vocabulary via listening/reading exercises.

To introduce these SBs, we do choral repetition, lots of modelling and translations using mini whiteboards (an old favourite) from Spanish to English and vice-versa. At this very early stage, I start using  a competition element among students: who can answer first (after giving some thinking time), tennis choral repetition (girls versus boys or just two teams in the class) or just awarding a sticker for every three correct translations. At this modelling stage, I like checking for understanding from all my students so the mini Whiteboard is and ideal too to do this.  


This is the list of activities I normally use throughout the Modelling stage for two/three lessons:

  • Translations from Spanish into English (using mini whiteboards in conjunction with TaskMagic (Flashcard type)

  •     Spot the missing word: I say a sentence from the SB sheet but I do not finish it, students need to write on their mini white boards the missing word or words! Sometimes anything can be good as long as it makes sense!
  •     Dictations
  •     Spot the mistake in listening activities: I read a text with differences from an English version and students need to annotate the mistake.

    Arrange the sentences in the order you hear them

  •     Delayed Dictation: like normal dictation but students cannot write down what they hear after a few seconds, 
  •     Stealing sentences (level 1: Reading/ gap filling) This is a Gianfranco Conti's classic and it works! Students write in 4 pieces of paper different numbers in relation to the sentences on the board (one number per paper) and start reading random sentences to each other. If students have the number of the sentence that is read to them, they must hand out their piece of paper. The winner is the student with the largest number of pieces of paper.


  •      Battleships Listening: I say sentences in Spanish and students write the coordinates of the sentences I say.  Great Listening/Modelling activity!

Finally!  After I introduce a set of SBs, students always, for homework, must learn these SBs. To help them to do so, I create Quizzlet (for KS4) and Memrise (for KS3) courses with the SBs we work with in lessons.  This promotes retrieval practice and independence in my students.



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