I am officially a ReadWriteThink fan! While looking at the lesson plans, I choose to come up with a set of criteria to evaluate its usefulness in my classroom. First the lesson had to be ESL/ELL friendly; then it needed to have an interactive component and finally, I need to be able to easily incorporate it with our scripted reading program. So after looking at about twenty different lesson plans, I continued to come back to the lesson, A is for Apple: Building Letter-Recognition Fluency. This lesson engaged the students in letter recognition, along with letter name and sound connections.
In the first session, students will become an active participant in the lesson. Students begin by going on a letter around the classroom. Their goal is to find the letter cards that the teacher has hidden. This is a great way to stir up excitement within the classroom. From there, students will assist the teacher in putting the letters in alphabetical order. After this the students are given an independent and interactive activity. Students will be given an ABC Book and they will have to go to a website and find some of the letters, as well as drawing a picture to match. I love this idea of this, because it would allow the students to have their own concrete examples of what the letters look like in their own handwriting. This is a wonderful activity to start and finish during Tech Week at my school.
The second session continues to have the students work on the computer to hear, see and write down/ draw pictures of words that start with each letter. Students will also be paired up during this time. This will allow the teach to scaffold the students learning. By pairing a student who already knows their ABCs and words that begin with each letter, with a student who does not; then the student who is able to can become a leader, who is able to make “child-like” connections, when communicating their thinking process.
The last session is a fun whole group activity that will allow the students to practice sharing everything that they have learned over the past few days, by playing the Uh-Oh! Game. Where students will draw out a letter card, and if they are able to say the letter, letter sound or a word that starts with the letter, then they get to keep it. If a student draws the Uh-Oh card, then they will have to put their letter cards back in the bag.
All three of the sessions met my criteria that I created when looking for a useful lesson. They were all ESL/ELL friendly, they were interactive, and I can easily incorporate these lessons into the Green Band (Sounds & Letters), as well as making the games accessible to students during our workshop time of ImagineIt!
~Rachel Hicks~