S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm

Assessment 1 Planning for literacy learning using multimodal resources

Part A. Teaching Plan.
Lesson Topic/Focus Adjectives Date 29.3.12
VELS Domain(s) English Grade(s)/Year Level(s) 2-3
VELS Dimension (or Religious Education Guideline)

Duration of Lesson 60 Minutes

Learning Outcome(s)/Standard(s):
Students will learn what adjectives are and how to use them, both verbally and in written format.
Indicators (2 or 3)
1. Students will be able to use adjectives to describe an image or object.
2. Students will be able to use adjectives to verbally describe an unknown object to a small group
of classmates.
3. Students will be able to write a clear and coherent short story including many adjectives,
describing something about their life. (Home, Family, Holiday)
Assessment: Criteria (2 or 3 to match indicators)
1. Students will be observed and understanding assessed by student being able to chose an
appropriate adjective to correctly describe the image or object displayed on smart board.
2. Students will be observed in their groups when describing an object to blindfolded peers.
Understanding is noticeably achieved if student can describe many features of object, including
size, weight, texture, smell, etc.
3. Students written work will be collected at end of class, and assessed on the use of adjectives to
describe their chosen topic.
Background to the learning:
A. Teacher
Teacher can read Hairy, Scary, Ordinary prior to class, to develop understanding in adjectives
and to be familiar with book prior to read aloud.
S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
B. Pupil
Students use adjectives already, but without fully knowing what they are and how they can be
used.


Lesson Resources:
- Hairy, Scary, Ordinary. What is an adjective? Picture book
Author: Brian P. Cleary. Illustrator: Jenya Prosmitsky
- Blindfolds and Adjective Bags
- PowerPoint presentation of slides with pictures to describe

Content of Lesson:
A. Introduction 5 mins
Explain to class that we will be learning about adjectives today, and ask students some of following
questions to find out their current knowledge about adjectives.
Who knows what adjectives are?
Why do we use adjectives?
Who can choose something in the classroom and create a sentence using an adjective to describe
it?
What words would you use to describe me? *teacher+
What words would you use to describe yourself?






S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
B. Development 25 mins
1. Students will be congregated on floor and teacher reads Hairy, Scary, Ordinary to class to give
students a better idea of adjectives and how often they can be used to describe almost
everything you come across.
Focus Question: What did you learn from this book?
2. Re-read through book, but get students to come up with different adjectives for the characters,
objects and placed depicted in the book.
Focus Question: What other adjectives can you use to describe this?
3. Whole class activity on white board is set up for students to get involved. PowerPoint
presentation includes pictures and a broken sentence with fill in the blank spot for an adjective.
Slide may be a image of a large, brown, fluffy cat, and the sentence would be This is a _______
cat. All slides will be looked at, and students are encouraged to think of words as the class sees
all the slides.
Focus Question: What words can you think of that can go in the blank spot?
4. Now the teacher is required to choose individual students to come up to the smart board and
hand write an appropriate adjective to fill the blank on each slide. Students will be observed for
their ability to find an accurate adjective.
Focus Question: Courtney* has chosen hairy* to fill in the gap, can anyone think of something
else?
5. The class will now be divided into 2 groups, each of which will do a separate activity in the next
part of the lesson before swapping half way through.
6. Explain to the class that the first group will be doing the Adjective Bag activity facilitated by
the teacher, while the second group will be writing a short paragraph using adjectives to
describe their house, family, holiday etc.
C. Consolidation and Practice 20 mins
1. Group 1 will divide themselves into groups of 2 or 3 and will take a Adjective Bag and
blindfolds. 1 Member of group will choose an object out of the bag to describe to their
blindfolded partners, for them to guess what it is from the adjective description. Once object is
guessed, students swap positions.
2. Group 2 will write a short paragraph describing something of their choice, for submission to the
teacher upon completion of lesson.
3. After 10 Minutes, groups will swap and complete the alternate activity.
4. After 20 Minutes elapsed, students will pack up activities and return to floor.
Early Finishers Extension Activities
D. Closure 10 mins
Teacher will ask a couple of students to share their written paragraph with the class, and collect all
written work for assessment.
S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
Part B. Rational for plan.
For my literacy teaching plan, I chose the topic of Adjectives. I chose to include a variety of multi-
modal resources for the teaching of my lesson including the reading of a book, a whole class
interactive smart board activity, a small group hands on and verbal activity, and also a solitary
creative written activity.
The first activity in my lesson plan for the students was a whole class Read Aloud of the book
Hairy, Scary, Ordinary by Brian Clearly. I chose this book after searching the internet for resources
on adjectives, specifically picture books for teaching adjectives. I found a number of picture books
suitable for my plan from The Best Childrens Books.org <http://www.the-best-childrens-
books.org/> but chose my book specifically as it is part of a series of books (Words are CATegorical)
that teach children about words such as adverbs, nouns, similes and metaphors, homonyms and
homophones etc. Series books are shown to be important to children as they feature recurring
themes pertinent to the average child (Suzannah Windsor). I believe this can be beneficial and also
enjoyable to the students as the other titles in the series can be used for further learning in the other
literary aspects, and they will have a familiarity with the way the author writes, the illustrations,
and will form and have a connection to the books while learning the desired literacy outcome. I
chose to present this book in a real aloud format as I am not presenting the book to educate the
children in reading and writing, so a shared or group reading format was not appropriate. In a read
aloud setting children are able to list and concentrate on enjoying and comprehending the story
without the burden of trying to decode the words (Fellowes & Oakley p225) Alternatively, Hairy,
Scary, Ordinary is also available for purchase as an iBook for interactive viewing on the smart board.
Following the read aloud activity, the whole class was involved in a fill in the blanks activity on the
interactive whiteboard (IWB). Interactive white boards and featured in more and more classrooms
S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
today and are a great tool for teaching as they allow teachers to present information to children in
new, interactive and exciting ways. From my experience in classrooms on placement, students love
coming up and being involved, writing on the IWB. The IWB allows small groups of children, up to
the whole class of children to interact around one central large computer screen, where the use of
fingers to touch, or a special pen can control or write on the screen. (Fellowes & Oakley p527)
The small group activity using the adjective bags I adapted from a Maths lesson at uni this
semester whereby the student picked up a shape out of a box, and without looking had to answer
questions based on its descriptive factors. This adjective activity I believe would be educational and
enjoyable for children as it is a more hands on fun activity, which also brings a form of intrinsic
motivation for the students as they want to guess what the other student is describing. This activity
develops students verbal skills as well as listening and comprehension.
The last activity, which formed the main assessment of the students understanding of adjectives
was the short hand written paragraph where the student was to write about something in their life
such as their house, family or holiday including as many descriptive words as possible. The open
ended nature of this activity made this an achievable task for even the less capable students, while
also allowing the higher level students to write to their ability and push their limits.
I tried to make my plan incorporate a variety of multi-modal resources, as well as providing
activities that will cater to the different types of learners within the student body. The activities can
provide learning opportunities for the less able students, the average student and the students that
excel.


S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm

Part C. Reflection on my learning.
I have learnt a lot about planning for literacy over the activities undertaken in tutorials and topics
discussed in lectures, and all have been a contributing factor in my final lesson plan submission for
this assignment.
The required activity of creating a glogster in week 3 taught me a lot about how far technology has
come since I was in primary school, and how this multi-modal resource can be used as a great
literacy learning device. The example glogster shown in class was very impressive, looked
professional, and with its incorporation of videos and images made it very visually pleasing, as well
as educational and insightful. Upon trying to create my own glogster, it was not as easy as I thought
it would be, it was a slow process as the website was continually crashing and not loading
everything I had placed onto it. In the end I finished my glogster but for the amount of time and
work I felt I put into it, I was not happy with it enough to consider it ready for a class resource, and
the feedback received from other students in tutorial reflected this also.
The tutorials we had about the different types of reading that can be done with a class I found
beneficial to me, and was the inspiration behind me choosing a book to read in my lesson plan. I
learnt that books are a great way to start off a lesson, getting children settled as well as interested.
Picture books are a great way to teach children a variety of different things through the use of the
simple story.
The forum activities as set out during the semester so far I was not able to comment on as the
learning federation website never e-mailed me to confirm my registration although I was able to
look on another students account and read a lot of the forum posts, and I found this very
S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
interesting and made me think about my lesson plan and what strategies would be appropriate to
my lesson plan.
I understand that every activity in the lesson must have a specific literacy learning outcome, and
that there must be an assessment of the lesson to gauge students understanding and learning. I also
learnt that you must know about students prior knowledge in the literary topic which I found
difficult to gauge and adjust my lesson plan accordingly without actually having a class of my own
to which I would actually be doing the lesson.











S00118415 Courtney Wright Monday 2pm
References:

Fellowes, J. & Oakley, G. (2010) Language, literacy and early childgood education. South Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.

Teaching Adjectives with Childrens books (2010) The Best Childrens Books.org < http://www.the-
best-childrens-books.org/teaching-adjectives.html> Accessed on: 22/3/2012

The Importance of Series Books for Children. Suzannah Windsor (2011) Internet Article. Accessed on
22/3/2012

Victorian Essential Early Learning Standards. (2009) < http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/> Victorian
Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Accessed on 22/3/2012

Winch, Gordan et al. (2004) Literacy Reading, writing and childrens literature. Second Edition.
South Melbourne, Oxford University Press.

Cleary, Brian P. (2001) Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What is an adjective?. Minneapolis. Millbrook Press.