I was so lucky this year, in that my Grade 7s walked into my English class bright eyed and bushy tailed – ready to go.

One boy put up his hand on the first day and declared, “I want to learn English, because I want to go to California.” From what I’ve been told, this is the middle-class Swedish dream. You do you little man – you do you.

It can be frightening though for a lot of kids to come in to Grade 7 English – it’s a big step up from Grade 6. In order to ease them in to it, our first unit is This is Me! It is always easy to talk about yourself, and your family am I right?

This is how the unit looks in our curriculum which is just an overview of everything.

I have tried to break each class down in to a lesson plan which is below. We scaffold (woo! buzzword!) the learning, so they review and go over a bunch of vocabuary and grammar points first, and then bring it all together in the summative.

 

 

All of the grammar and vocabulary is formative – meaning that I won’t grade it. However, I tell my students that these matter just as much, because if I am unsure about what their grades are at the end of the year, I can go back to their formative results and see how they did.

Before I give them their final activity, I do a quick run through of what a good presentation looks like. I don’t really go thoroughly on this though, because this will come later in the term. I will post my PPT and exercises on presentations some day. I usually just show them this video of Obama speaking.

 

Their final activity in this unit is the summative This is Me presentation. To let the little Grade 7s ease into presenting, I let them do this first presentation in small groups. Before they present, I make them practice with each other, so they can get feedback on what they did well and what they need to improve.

However, there is a listening component to this as well, because students have to record information about ONE fellow presenter.

I will mostly likely give them a template for that, but that is last on my to do list. To be honest – it will probably be that one thing I think of 10 minutes before class starts… where I go “SH*T! I knew I forgot something.”

 

 

 

FINAL STEP: As many of you know, I love James Nottingham and John Hattie. Hattie says that another great exercises we can do to allow our students to develop, is let them do a self-assessment afterwards. I plan on giving them this rubric so they can think about what they did well on and what they need to improve for next time.