Class OnAir Lesson 16.mp4

Direct Instruction

This is a lesson based on the concept of biological rhythms, which is part of the Plant and Animal Responses exam for Year 13. It's extremely vocabulary-heavy, and concepts all interweave. In this lesson I'm using a strategy that our literacy specialist Marc Milford helped me learn. Students can select their small groups to work with, and they know that the paragraph they create together will be shared on whiteboards at the end of the lesson and then judged! They appeared to enjoy and most certainly engaged with the learning.

Extended plan here

Reflection

I think this was a really excellent activity and it certainly stimulated a lot of discussion and sharing of help between classmates as they co-constructed paragraphs together. This has been the most difficult video to edit, because there was so much valuable discussion happening between Api, Salome and Ruth. They helped each other with the vocabulary, the understanding of the concept, their paragraph construction and even the grammar of their paragraph. I didn't scaffold them into the paragraph at all, which actually turned out to be fine, and I also didn't leave QUITE enough time at the end of the lesson for the writing-up onto the whiteboard and judging. I would absolutely repeat this again next year.