During this semester, our English counseling team members planned together and participated in a teaching plan competition of the Ministry of Education. We hoped to integrate the literacy or so-called core competency into English teaching and enrich the teaching elements of this unit. Although the time-and–energy consuming “lesson planning” did not get the ranking, it’s still a good accumulation of our teaching experience. The following is a summary of the teaching process of this unit. This is only the first part. We will introduce other parts next time.

Warm up
--Watch the video, “Practice makes perfect.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm-RztsGDEw

1. The teacher plays the video for 1 minute.
2. The teacher stops the video and asks, “What kind of sports or activities do you see?”
3. Students from each team take turns answering, “go jogging, play soccer, play basketball”
4. The teacher pastes the cards, “go jogging, play soccer, play basketball” on the board.
5. The teacher asks, “Did they do a good job?” and “Why?”
6. The teacher may lead students to answer, “They play __ every day.” “They practice every day.” “They practice in their free time.”
7. The teacher also leads students to answer, “The key to success is__”
8. The teacher pastes the sentence strip, “Practice makes perfect.” on the board.
9. Besides these sports, what kind of activities do you know?
10. Students start to think of some activities.

Activities from the video, “Practice makes perfect.” It introduces some common activities forstudents to learn.

Presentation
--Activities on the cards

1. Some students will raise up the hands to tell the class the activities they’ve learned before.
2. The teacher gives students some points. The teacher also gives a blank word card and a marker to the students and let them write down the activities they know on the blank cards.

Students think of activities and write them on the cards

--Oral clues for introducing the activities

1. After some named activities students have offered, the teacher wants to focus on some activities, so she stops the conversation and interaction with the students. The teacher starts to say some sentences or do some actions to help students to guess the activities.
2. For example, the teacher says, “It’s a class-to-class sport. It’s exciting. You will throw a ball like this way!” (doing a crazy facial expression)Students will say, “play dodge ball” and the teacher helps to paste the card on the board.
3. After giving students hints to guess the right activities, the teacher asks some volunteer students to come up and show them the cards. Studentson the platform need to do actions or say some clues to let the whole class guess the right activity.
4. Teachers or students help paste the cards on the board when there is anyone who guesses the right activity.

1.The volunteer student gives hints to the whole class. 2.Many students raise up hands to guess the activity. 3.The student pastes the card on the board when there is anyone who guesses the right activity.

Practice
--Divide the words into groups

1. Students and the teacher discuss how to classify and divide the activities into some parts.
2. Outdoors/indoors, fun/boring, safe/dangerous, violent/tender, dry/wet, healthy/unhealthy, go _/ play _,/do, and others
3. Students divide the activities into parts and write them on the mini white board.
4. Students go to the front and present their board orally.
5. They need to say, “We divide the activities into 2 parts. They are ___ and ___.”
   

Students divide the activities into groups , draw some picture around and do the presentation

Wrap up

• Word association

1. Students will get some hints or key words to guess what the activity is.
2. Each member of the team takes turns writing down the answer on the small white board.
3. Rubrics of the game:
   (1) The first team that first shows the answer, reads it out and spells it correctly can get 3 points.
   (2) The others can have 2 points if they spell and read the word correctly.
   (3) The team who can either read it or spell it correctly can get one point.
4. The following are the hints and the answers. (new vocabs with image help students extend related words)
   

• a. circle, Giant, , helmet ,  go biking
• b. fire, mountain, family, tent go camping
• c. trail, backpack, boots, pole,  go hiking
• d. mall, credit card, goods, cart  go shopping
• e. sea, boat, river, rod go fishing
• f. water, summer, sport, goggles go swimming
• g. water, wave, board, exciting go surfing

Homework

• Differentiated Homework

For most teachers, workbooks are for copying the words and sentences. But this kind of “practice” makes students feel bored easily. In order to add more variety and excitement into students’ homework, we think of a different way for their homework.

Following from the previous activity,“Word association,” we have students open up to the homework page of their workbook and have an oral discussion about what to write on the page. With the ideas from the previous activity, they think of many terms to describe the activity. After they go home to finish the homework, they can also surf the Internet to get more ideas about how to describe the activity in a more special way.

Students think of hints about activities.	For lower achievers, copy down the vocabulary words

Reflection

The original plan was to divide students into teams and let them group the activities. After discussion with their team members, they wrote the activities they have divided on the small whiteboard. Then, they needed to write the classified activities onto the blank page of their homework book. However, we had found that it took too much time.

What’s more, some of the lower achievers could not complete the work independently. Therefore, we did it in another way. The process was presented on the first and second page. The whole group did the oral presentation together. It avoided some embarrassment. Besides, through cooperation, children can help and learn from one another. The goal of the activity also meets one of the requirements of the new curriculum-helping others.

The original plan- Students wrote their ideas of dividing the activities into groups on the blank pages of their writing books. After discussion- We took this part away and did a whole group presentation instead.