"MY FAMILY - Unit Transaction Part 2" (Extended speaking and writing activities.)
Lesson: MY FAMILY
Class: 1st grade
Skills: Speaking and writing.
Young students, especially those in elementary school don’t benefit from long attention spans. Keeping your students engaged while teaching them better writing skills is no small task. Regular reading is a stepping stone to better writing and helps kids’ strengthen their writing skills. It helps expand children’s vocabulary and shows them different ways of using words. This also makes it easier for them to use these words in their own writing. So I plan my every activity to give scope to integrate speaking, reading and writing skills. I have used same activity to develop speaking, reading and writing.
I hope you have read the first part of the unit transaction. In this post you can see the next part of transaction. I have planned an extended speaking activity to talk about their family members. For the task I have prepared the below pictures to get an idea what to talk and how the family members are helping. For example:
1. Mother cooks food for us.
2. Father plays with me.
3. Grandmother tells me stories.
4. Grandfather takes me to a park.
I have presented the description in meaningful way. later I have asked my children to present.
So presentation through pictures helped my children to speak easily about their family members. You can watch few of my children's presentation in the above video.
For students experiencing difficulty in writing, it is beneficial to break the elements of writing into small, specific steps, teach these steps systematically and then provide opportunities for these steps to be practised individually before combining into a large piece of writing. So picture writing or timeline writing will help your learners to connect and memorize the events of a story or the content.
I have planned a fun writing task in the next period to comprehend their learning. I have prepared the below worksheet and word slips of family members. I am simultaneously teaching alphabets and the lesson my family. So the main objective of the writing task is to get my children to identify and write the first letter of the objects or things and recognize the graphic of the words father, mother, sister, and brother. So I have asked them to colour the pictures, write the alphabet and recognize and past the family member's word slip.
Vygotsky (1967/2004) proposed that there are differences between oral and written language. His work with children led him to believe that the difficulty of writing is due to the “laws” of written language which children have not yet mastered. He states that verbal creativity is not developed until puberty, and until then drawing is often children’s best means of expressing themselves.
Thanks for reading.