Science Benchmark

Working title: Language Arts Unit Plan

Language Arts Unit Plan

EED-475

Emily Belleu

10/29/2015

Mini Lesson Plans for Grade 8

Introduction: Teaching and instruction are one of the most difficult professions. The specific need to be able to get a lesson across to a group of the student of diverse cultures, ethnicity and mother tongues in one uniform language is itself a difficult asks. Then, every lesson has to be planned in a manner where every child in the class room can follow the instruction, learn from it and be able to reproduce the experience to show that the lesson has been understanding. Every child’s learning capacity is not the same therefore the lesson plan that has to be devised is one that will allow all the students collectively to follow the lesson plan.

Definition of Lesson Plan: A lesson plan can be defined as the preparation and the planning that a teacher does to teach on any given day. The lesson plan includes the date of the reading, the subject of the lesson the aims and objectives of the lesson and the tools and materials that will be used to teach a particular lesson. It is a complete description and explanation of an experience that is to be taught by a teacher in a classroom (Meador, 2014).

Mini Lessons for 8th grade

Monday: Oral and Vocabulary, the subject will be ‘Partners on the Dance Floor’. The students will be made to watch the film on video and after it is over to be able to describe orally and express what has been comprehended by watching the movie. The objective is to find out that level of comprehension in the medium of instruction and the size of the vocabulary of each student as they orally explain one by one their perception of the film that they have watched. The second object is to increase the level of participation through discussions on the movie and the personal opinions of the students. They will be asked to analyze the characters of each actor in the film (POV, 2015).

Tuesday: Phonics, word pattern, and word analysis. The subject of this lesson will be the poem ‘Homage to my Hips’ by Lucile Clifton. The students will be made to listen to the recitation of the poem. Every student will be done tore cite the poem individually with the same expressions and the stress on particular words. The use of the words in the poem will be discussed orally and they students will be asked to provide different words for those in the poem that can be replaced at yet rhyme at the same time. The tape will be played several times for the students. Next they will be given half a word on the blackboard, and they need to complete the phrase correctly in writing or orally. On the computer, the program for word jigsaw will be given in front of each student, and the jigsaw puzzle of 20 words will need to be completed in 20 minutes. The objective of this lesson is to be able to enunciate the phrase correctly and clearly using phonetics as a method of instruction. The patterns of words will become recognizable, and the puzzle will help them to analyze the words and the patterns (Belvins, 2015).

Wednesday: Fluency. The subject will be ‘The Hobbit’ by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is a novel that every 8thg reader loves and is familiar with. Digital voice recorders and microphones will be sued. Each student will be made to read any passage from the book with expression, and the reading fluency will be recorded. When the entire class has finished, each student will be able to hear how they sounded like when they read, and they will be asked to identify the areas of fluency that they find missing in their recording with the teacher’s comments added to it.

This will help students to work individually on the fluency aspect of reading that will also increase the fluency of writing. The objective is for every student to understand how fluent they are in reading and it will also help them to recognize why they make mistakes while writing. When they can identify what is wrong in their fluency, the awareness itself will make the student want to correct it (Plackner, 2015).

Thursday: Reading Comprehension. The subject of this lesson will be ‘The Wall’ by Eve Bunting. The students will be paired for this lesson. Each pair will read a text from the book. A list of questions will be prepared such as the author’s style of writing, the questions that come to the mind of each pair of students when hearing the text read by individual couples, each pair’s understanding of the text and the thesis question that has been prepared to research the context. There will be eleven pairs of students in this reading comprehension class. Therefore, a dozen copies of the book will be used in the course.

After they have put down what they have comprehended of the book the short film on the book will be shown to the class by the use of a digital video. The students will then be asked to individually compare their understanding of the text and the understanding of the visuals and create a comparison. This comparison will be made by each student individually through oral methods of communication (Teachers Vision, 2015).

Friday: Writing. “What do you think intelligence is? Can someone with no education be more intelligent than a person with a degree?” “What do you look forward to most about being an adult? What do you think you will miss most about being a child/teenager?” The above two topics will be the writing prompts for the students. They will need to write freestyle creatively about anyone the questions in their natural style. The objective is to make the students think critically as participants of a future time on the planet and the recreate their thoughts in words. This will also show their level of understanding, the vocabulary, their general knowledge levels and the proficiency required to move up to the 9th grade.

The above are the details of the mini lesson plan that has been prepared for a week for the students of the 8th grade. Different types of instructional material have been used to make the class interesting and to increase the levels of participation of the class. The activity levels in the class will ensure that the students concentrate and focus on the lesson and the instruction by choosing topics that an 8th grader would like to read and see. This aim is to create passion for learning and understanding the text, poems and the visuals that are the basis of an 8th grader’s lifestyle and each student can identify with the lesson subjects that have been chosen for the week.

The mini lesson plan for the entire week has been designed to increase the levels of fluency in comprehension and reading. This will also in turn increase the levels of fluency in writing automatically. By watching themselves on video and digital recording, the students will be able to see their mistakes and rectify them Every student will have some mistake so no student will shy away from recognizing the weaknesses when the entire class, in general, accepts their weaknesses. The jigsaw puzzle will help to understand the level of weaknesses in each student and the strengths of each student.

The recognition of word patterns and rude words and their meaning on a puzzle will make it attractive for the students easy to understand, and it will provide the opportunity to know the size of the vocabulary of each student. The short documentary film will create the opportunity for the students to focus on the theme of the documentary and they will also be introduced to the short documentary films that provided research material, and every student will be able to learn to pick out the theme of a subject, create questions that would require research and create the curiosity that would make the students look for information from outside sources other than the class textbooks. What will become evident with this design is the degree of critical thinking that has developed in the students of 8th grade and what more needs to be done to increase the levels by which every student can gain confidence and understanding of all types of topics and subjects (Writing Prompts, 2015).

Conclusion: The aim of the mini lesson plans is to be able to make teaching and learning an enjoyable experience by increase the involvement and the participation of the entire class. When rapport is built through participation it becomes simpler for the students to ask questions which they would usually hesitate to ask these issues by 8th graders, are often seen to be pertinent questions that require correct answers. By increasing the levels of critical thinking and analysis, the general standards of the students in the 8th grade will also increase and no child will be left behind in the literacy program.

References

Belvins, Wiley. (2015) Lesson Plan and Activities for Teaching Phonics to 8th Graders, Lesson Plans, and www.lessonplans.com Retrieved on April 23rd, 2015

Meader, Derrick (2014) Lesson Plan, About Education, www.abouteducation.com Retrieved on April 23rd, 2015

Planner, Lisa. (2015) Fluency Lesson Plan, Assessing Reading Fluency, Digital Wish, www.digitalwish.com Retrieved on April 23rd, 2015

POV (2015) Documentaries with a Point of View, For Educators,www.pbs.org/pov

Teachers Vision (2015) Reading Comprehension Resources for 8th Grade, www.teachervision.com Retrieved on April 23rd, 2015

Writing Prompts, (2015) 8th Grade Writing Prompts, www.writingprompts.net/8th grade, retrieved on April 23rd, 2015