Effective Lesson Planning and Classroom Management

Posted on Feb 13, 2025 in Pedagogy

Ways to Organize a Lesson Plan

  • Chart: Visually organize the lesson flow.
  • Bulleted List: Clearly outline each step.
  • Notes: Insert notes between textbook pages.

Teaching Aids for Engaging Lessons

  • Music and songs
  • Realia (real-world objects)
  • Bulletin board
  • Whiteboard and markers / Blackboard and chalk
  • Flip chart
  • Pictures, photographs, posters, charts
  • Puppets, clay figures
  • Textbooks, worksheets, dictionaries
  • Jazz chants, drama scripts

Essential Classroom Equipment

  • Tape player and tape / Compact disc player and CDs
  • Overhead projector and transparencies
  • LCD projector and screen
  • Computer, printer, and software
  • Radio
  • Television
  • Video/DVD player
  • Recorder material

Ways to Recognize a Learner’s Effort

  • Symbols: Stickers, stars, smiley faces on papers.
  • Expressions of Praise: “Great!”, “Super!”, “Well done!”.
  • Non-Verbal: Clapping, giving a thumbs-up, giving a high-five, smiling and nodding, pretending formality.

Different Ways to Nurture Grammatical Awareness

  • Chants: Use jazz chant type rhymes frequently; these contain many repetitive structures.
  • Action Games: For example, clap loudly in a game for emphasis on negative structures.
  • Describing Illustrations: Useful for verb tenses, prepositions of place, pronouns, and so on.
  • Dictation with Focus on a Particular Part of Speech: Text has all of the adjectives or prepositions missing, for example; students gain awareness of word order.

Useful Tools for Pronunciation Practice

  • Jazz Chants: Repetitive language forms combined with jazz rhythms. They expose learners to variations in sound, stress, rhythm, intonation, pitch, and volume.
  • Poems and Rhymes: Language in verse form with a clear emphasis on rhyme.
  • Tongue-Twisters: Use repetitive vowel/consonant sounds for a fun verbal warm-up.
  • Drills: Fine-tune pronunciation through repeated oral practice of a word or a sound.

Kinds of Puppets You Can Make and Use

  • Sock puppets
  • Stick puppets
  • Paper bag puppets
  • Finger puppets

Ways of Learning to Read

  • Phonics: Learning to read by connecting letters and sounds. Techniques: Sounding out, special letters, memory aids.
  • Language Experience: Learning to read through observing a teacher transcribe a learner’s oral description of an experience. Techniques: Describing pictures or field trips.
  • Whole Language: Learning to read by listening repeatedly to stories. Techniques: Big Books, story reading.
  • Whole Word: Learning to read by connecting objects or pictures to the whole written word or phrase. Techniques: Flashcards, labeled objects in the classroom.
  • Mnemonics (Keyword Memory Aids): Learning to read by associating letter-symbols to images. Techniques: Pictures such as a sun with wavy s-shaped rays.

Techniques Used in Story-Reading Lessons

  • Getting students to repeat words and phrases.
  • Drawing attention to words by pointing to them.
  • Using illustrations as a starting point for prediction.
  • Asking questions and talking about the story.

The Writing Process

  1. Brainstorm ideas on the storyline.
  2. Select ideas, then organize them into a logical sequence.
  3. Write the first draft.
  4. Edit the text: check meaning, style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
  5. Make the final copy.

Ways of Giving Instructions

  • Direct Commands: “Close the window.”, “Please close the window.”, “Close that window right now!”.
  • Requests in Statement Form: “I’d like you to close the window now, if you don’t mind.”
  • Requests in Question Form: “Could you close the window, please?”
  • Indirect Instructions: “Susie, I see that the window is open; it’s really cold in here.”

Ways of Organizing Learners

  • Whole class
  • Groups / Groups of 3 (Triads)
  • Groups of 4 (Quads)
  • Pairs
  • Individuals

Rewards for Good Behavior

  • Sitting in a special place (teacher’s desk, beanbag chair, rocking chair).
  • Special lunch reward (sit with teacher, principal).
  • Being first (in the lunch line, to choose, playground equipment, leader of a class game).
  • Using special classroom tools (stamps and ink, colored chalk).
  • Having special privileges (bring a stuffed animal to school to put on the child’s table).
  • Getting recognition (teacher calls parents with praise for the child, child wears a special badge, child earns “Good Kid Coupons”).