Learning Experience 2
Description
This learning experience focuses on the new vocabulary discovered in the focus text. Students will predict meanings of these new words using prior knowledge and other language strategies to decode meanings. This activity has been chosen as there will be many unfamiliar words in the history unit. By choosing other KLA vocabulary words students will be prepared and make stinger connections between English and History (Overturf, Montgomery & Smith, 2013).
Duration
30 minutes
Curriculum
QCAA Literacy Indicators
WC 5
x. Select learning area vocabulary that:
VR 5
vii. Predict and confirm the meaning of unfamiliar words and decode them using and combining cues within different texts containing new language features, content and ideas and complex sentences, vocabulary and visual features.
LS 5
vii. Use new learning area vocabulary to provide specific meaning.
Resources
This learning experience focuses on the new vocabulary discovered in the focus text. Students will predict meanings of these new words using prior knowledge and other language strategies to decode meanings. This activity has been chosen as there will be many unfamiliar words in the history unit. By choosing other KLA vocabulary words students will be prepared and make stinger connections between English and History (Overturf, Montgomery & Smith, 2013).
Duration
30 minutes
Curriculum
QCAA Literacy Indicators
WC 5
x. Select learning area vocabulary that:
- clarifies meaning
- has different meanings in different contexts
- etymology
- technical words, including nominalisations, developed from prior learning, reading or research about the content
VR 5
vii. Predict and confirm the meaning of unfamiliar words and decode them using and combining cues within different texts containing new language features, content and ideas and complex sentences, vocabulary and visual features.
LS 5
vii. Use new learning area vocabulary to provide specific meaning.
Resources
- Gold! Focus text class set
- Activity sheet
- Whiteboard
- Whiteboard markers
- Pride and Prejudice Video from YouTube
Gold! Vocabulary Worksheet | |
File Size: | 102 kb |
File Type: |
Lesson Objectives
Learning Experience Overview
Activity adapted from QCAA - Teaching reading and viewing
Differentiation
With the two children that are ESL I have allowed for them to only read out one sentence. This sentence will be preselected before class to make sure it is not too challenging and achievable for both students. This way they will not feel embarrassed in front of their peers for mispronunciation of words. This will also boost their confidence and motivation by being included in round robin reading (Tompkins, Campbell & Green, 2012).
Having a class set of the focus text will allow for students to have a better comprehension and understanding of the text. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences supports the having a book for every student o because of the students that are more visual learners. By interpreting the images in the book these students have a great opportunity to better interpret the text itself by having it right in front of them (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2010). Having the text in front of them also benefits students with hearing impairments that may not be able to follow along with the readers but can read in the heads as the class follows (Harrison, 2011).
This in depth focus on certain vocabulary will be extremely beneficial to the ESL students in the class. Understanding the new vocabulary now will make future lessons easier to understand. Having that better understanding of the vocabulary will allow these students to engage more within the classroom (Harrison, 2011).
- Understand that vocabulary and language changes over time
- Use prior knowledge to make predictions about unfamiliar words
- Understand that context provides valuable information about unfamiliar words
- Navigate a dictionary to find definitions of unfamiliar words
Learning Experience Overview
- Motivate students by listening to video from Pride and Prejudice.
- Discuss what the difference is between that conversation and the conversations students might have at dinner with their families. Have students justify their answers.
- Pose question: If there was a gold rush tomorrow would people on the gold rush use the same language as today or like in the conversation just heard?
- Give students time to think and then ask for opinions, once again making sure students justify their answers.
- How do you think they would talk?
- Explain that today students will be looking more in depth in the different vocabulary used on the Australian goldfields and what their meanings are.
- Hand out Australian gold rush vocabulary activity sheet.
- Pre select unfamiliar words from the focus text Gold! that students will be discussing
- Present the words in isolation. Read out the word so that students know how it sounds. Ask students to suggest a definition and to justify their guesses.
- Then present each word in its context. As before, ask students to suggest and justify meanings.
- Continue this process until all words have been discussed.
- Next ask students to use a dictionary to verify their predictions and write definitions on activity sheet.
- As a class, discuss the quality of predictions given for the words in isolation versus those in context. Discuss the differences in strategies for predicting words in isolation and words in context.
- The strategy shows students that context provides valuable information about new words, allows informed predictions, and is a more successful and satisfying strategy than guessing the meaning of a word in isolation. Students become actively involved in the discovery of new word meanings and learn useful reading behaviours from one another.
- Read focus text beginning at page 17 all the way until the end stopping at the words that have been previously discussed and asking students to write the sentence each word has been used in.
- Start off with teacher reading before selecting students to read sections.
- Select the 2 ESL students to read only one sentence each not an entire section.
Activity adapted from QCAA - Teaching reading and viewing
Differentiation
With the two children that are ESL I have allowed for them to only read out one sentence. This sentence will be preselected before class to make sure it is not too challenging and achievable for both students. This way they will not feel embarrassed in front of their peers for mispronunciation of words. This will also boost their confidence and motivation by being included in round robin reading (Tompkins, Campbell & Green, 2012).
Having a class set of the focus text will allow for students to have a better comprehension and understanding of the text. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences supports the having a book for every student o because of the students that are more visual learners. By interpreting the images in the book these students have a great opportunity to better interpret the text itself by having it right in front of them (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2010). Having the text in front of them also benefits students with hearing impairments that may not be able to follow along with the readers but can read in the heads as the class follows (Harrison, 2011).
This in depth focus on certain vocabulary will be extremely beneficial to the ESL students in the class. Understanding the new vocabulary now will make future lessons easier to understand. Having that better understanding of the vocabulary will allow these students to engage more within the classroom (Harrison, 2011).