4 point Loop

ET: One of my lessons tonight fit perfectly into the loop in that all four parts of it were very well rounded so there was ample time to spend on each part. First, there as the review of the previous one point. I’d already looked into the student’s file to prepare for the lesson so I was only waiting for the right moment to jog his memory. He’d been talking about a restaurant that he’d gone to over the weekend, an Italian restaurant that he frequently visited. I then took the opportunity to introduce a famous seafood restaurant in Canada to him – Red Lobster. I asked him if he knew of Red Lobster and he replied with a simple ‘no.’ So, I asked him if he knew of any other phrase that he could express ‘no’ with. He thought about it for a second before recalling the one point, “I’ve never heard of it.”

ITEM: On we moved to the item. Today we would be using Comparisons 2 since he’d never done it before. It was fresh and new and he attentively followed the introduction of the examples and took great notes from the board. After giving him the basic format of how to compare A to B, I wrote up some comparisons on the board, leaving blank spaces where he could fill in the appropriate adjectives. For example, “Angelina Jolie isn’t as __________ as Jodie Foster.” He started off by sticking in nouns in the blank spaces until I told him that adjectives were necessary and why. After the third sentence, he’d gotten the hang of it and was coming up with some pretty decent adjectives. To build up his vocabulary, I suggested some alternatives, which he carefully jotted down in his new vocab box in the top corner of his page. Once we’d finished that, we moved onto the agreeing and disagreeing. We flipped over to a page in the text with some interesting statements that he was required to agree or disagree with. Agreeing was easy because it meant repeating the original statement as part of the answer. But we had to work a bit on the disagreeing because he had trouble rearranging the sentence to express his opinions.

ROUTINE: After the item, we reviewed Routine 6. Seeing as how the routine was being used as a review, I stuck to the question portion to fit it into the time frame we were left with. He’d been exposed to these particular questions before so he had a general idea of how to answer them. Still, we went over the questions slowly to make sure that his answers were suitable for the questions. He wasn’t sure how to answer one question because it didn’t pertain to the story that he was telling so I told him that for the purpose of practicing the questions it was okay to make up an answer.

ONE POINT :We’d gone five minutes over by the time the routine was done but I still managed to work in the new one point so that he’d have something to work with for next class. So the next time I see him, he’ll probably have an interesting new sentence to finish off, “Even if…”, with.