Combining tools and strategies to make a great lesson

Have you ever stopped to think about how many tools and teaching strategies we have available to use? If you have been in the profession long enough, you will know that just a few years ago, all these resources were not available to use. And now with blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, people can share wonderful ideas that once were only available through attendance at in-person workshops.

I want to share a quick way to set up any lesson that uses some type of story or information. This can be a children’s book or a news segment. It can be something already found on the Internet or something you record yourself. This plan will keep students engaged and the class flow moving.

Select your content

Select the content that you want to use. You want the content to be age-appropriate as well as level-appropriate. It can connect to your unit theme or be totally unrelated.

A daily lesson example

1. Select the video
2. Use images to tell the story. This can be clipart, images from online, drawn by you, or used from the story you are telling.
3. Use a graphic organizer to have students sumamrize what they understood using images, words, or a combiantion of both. You can find premade graphic organizers here.
4. If there are a lot of new vocabualry in the story, play a game like Gimkit.
5. Make a cooperative mural. Using a whiteboard or piece of bucher paper, create several boxes for students to draw in. Then begin calling students up one by one to draw a scene from the story. Discuss the drawing and the scene after each student is finished.
6. Place the video in an Edpuzzle and create questions to check for understanding.

You are done

Believe it or not, that is it. The hardest part about planning out a lesson like this is finding the right video content. So if you find yourself with a video and you are stuck trying to figure out what to do with it, try using this plan. It is quick, engaging, and fun.

Enhance your lesson

Try some of the strategies and ideas from these blog posts to help you create an even more dynamic and engaging learning environment.

1. Picture talks
2. 4 comprehsnible input strategies
3. Video Shorts in the classroom

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