Lesson Presentation on Prezi

To click on the image below to view the Prezi presentation that shows one possible way to organize the lesson. Scroll down for more communicative activities, downloadable worksheets and interactive activities.

ch in chicken – Activity 1: Warm-up (Ordering in a restaurant)

Students watch the first 2 minutes of the video clip and answer the following questions:

1) What are they doing?

2) What do they order?

This activity is to activate schema of the students and generate discussion about eating out in a restaurant, ordering food in their home country, and their experiences in a Canadian restaurant.

Also, the activity will guide the students’ attention to the words with “ch” as in “chicken” to lead to the vocabulary building exercise – Activity 2.

ch in chicken – Activity 2: Vocabulary introduction

This vocabulary building activity is to introduce all 8 focused words to the students. At this stage, the students do not have to produce the sound or recognize the sound-letter correspondence. They can work individually with their own pace with the worksheet and then compare their answers with their classmates once they are finished.

Focused literacy skill(s): Reading – letter recognition

Option 1: Spelling check

Option 2: Word search

（source: Phonics for Adult ESL Students)

ch in chicken – Activity 3: Vocabulary reinforcement

Effective repetition and spiraling are crucial during cognitive process. Engage their multiple intelligences can help literacy students to reinforce the decoding skills for later on reading comprehension. The following 3 activities all have a kinesthetic component for vocabulary building.

Focused literacy skill(s): word level decoding

Option 1: Matching with cards.

It can be a pair or group activity. Variations are: memorizing/concentration, fishing.

Option 2: Smartboard matching activity

The Smartboard activity includes 2 picture-word matching activities (4 words each) and a fill-in-blanks activity with 7 questions.

The activity is uploaded to Smart Exchange – Canada. Click on the image and it will take you to the downloadable file. It doesn’t need to register to download.

Option 3: Interactive memory game (MS Excel 97-2003 version)

Click on the image and download the game. The Macros and Active X need to be enabled to play the game. The tiles will be randomly reshuffled every time when the Start/Reset button is clicked.

ch in chicken – Activity 4: Sound demonstration

One of the challenges ESL literacy students are facing is to learn the sound, the letter and their correspondence at the same time. The following website offers visuals of sound production of both animated anatomy and a real person demonstration. In this way, the students can watch the video as many times as they want on their own either at home or in the lab to work at their own cognitive pace.

To access the phonetics website, click on the following image, then click on “voice” –> “voiceless” –> individual sound.

ch in chicken – Activity 5: Listening discrimination

Listening discrimination is crucial for literacy student to get familiar with the new sound. Depending on their level, the teacher can start by asking students to give short responses, such as raising their hands when they hear /tʃ/ sound, when listening to the teacher reading aloud the words on the worksheet(Option1). When they are comfortable identifying the sound, they can be given the worksheet to work on recognizing letter-sound correspondence.

Option 1:

Option 2:

It is a more advanced version compared to Option 2 as the students are working on the sentence level reading. It can be adapted into a “Back and Forth” where the students read the sentence they finished to the whole group for feedback.

Option 3: Smartboard activity

This is the Smartboard version of the Option 2 activity. It is part of the Smartboard lesson plan in Activity 3, which can be downloaded by clicking the following image, if you haven’t done so. The teacher will read a sentence and the students need to click on one of the answers. If the computers in your lab have Smartboard application, it can be installed on each computer the students use and then they can give responses when listening to the teacher.

（source: Phonics for Adult ESL Students)

ch in chicken – Activity 6: Fill in the consonants and copy

The pre-requisite for this activity is that the students have acquired p, l and s in their previous phonics classes. The following worksheet can be used for different purposes: to test memorizing the focused vocabulary or to use spelling conventions, such as ch, p, l and s. For the second purpose, the words can be read aloud by students as clues to fulfill the task.

Focused literacy skill(s): letter-sound correspondence, to understand and use basic spelling conventions.

（source: Phonics for Adult ESL Students)

ch in chicken – Activity 7: Words in conversation

This is a transition from word level exercises to further real life tasks of speaking and reading. Students read at the sentence level but only need to produce at the word level. Also, they are introduced with the grammar structure for the next role play activity implicitly. Depending on the students’ language proficiency, the words can be put on the whiteboard and the students can choose from the list.

ch in chicken – Activity 8: Role play

Sociolinguistic competencies should be included in ESL literacy phonics activities, along with vocabulary and structure that help ESL students to function in real life. By being able to apply what they learn in the classroom can also motivate them to take more interest in phonological awareness, phonics learning and their class content in general.

（source: Phonics for Adult ESL Students)

ch in chicken – Activity 9: Short story reading

The short story is to engage students in a meaningful task where reading comprehension skills are exercised to apply what they have learned in the previous decoding activities.

Focused literacy skill(s):

• Get information from very basic short texts;
• Identify specific details of texts.

Notes:

If you have a group of students who are literate in their first language but hampered by lacking communication skills in English, it can also be turned into a listening exercise by giving the students top half of the worksheet and asking them to give short responses of “Yes” and “No” orally when listening to the teacher reading the statement from the second half of the activity.