Learning by sharing
I received an email from a language acquisition teacher few days ago. She inquired the possibility to exchange unit planners. She is the only language acquisition teacher at school and doesn't have anyone to build language acquisition unit plans collectively with her. What a great idea! Language acquisition teachers are sometimes the minority at school and they sometimes don't have anyone who can collaborate with and bounce ideas off. They want to improve their practice and will appreciate to see some concrete examples in order to revise, refine and/or change they way they teach and plan. In education, we talked about the importance of providing exemplars to students a lot, and I think teachers can certainly benefit from seeing good (and bad) examples of unit plans.
My unit plan is undoubtedly not the best, but I am happy to share and receive feedback. Feedback from others often helps me expand my perspectives and inspires me with more innovative ideas. If You are reading this post, you are invited and encouraged to share. We sometimes are very critical of ourselves and worry that what we do might not be the best. The truth is that we always have room for improvement, and nobody can truly be the best or perfect. If we can all share one idea, we will have lots of great ideas. I am sharing one of my language acquisition unit plans to start this trend, learning by sharing.
My unit plan is undoubtedly not the best, but I am happy to share and receive feedback. Feedback from others often helps me expand my perspectives and inspires me with more innovative ideas. If You are reading this post, you are invited and encouraged to share. We sometimes are very critical of ourselves and worry that what we do might not be the best. The truth is that we always have room for improvement, and nobody can truly be the best or perfect. If we can all share one idea, we will have lots of great ideas. I am sharing one of my language acquisition unit plans to start this trend, learning by sharing.
Unit title: cuisine (Phase 1&3)
It is time consuming and challenging to plan the unit when we have mixed language proficiency levels in the same class. I am sharing an MYP language acquisition unit plan with differentiated instructions for phase 1 and phase 3 students. This unit was implemented as the fourth unit (the last unit) in the second semester for grade 9 students. Therefore, students had been developing Chinese linguistic skills, knowledge, and understanding for the past seven months. Here is the statement of inquiry for this unit.
We explore Chinese cuisine through the lens of cultural heritage. This unit lasted for approximately 30 hours. Topics include:
- traditional and cultural trends through cuisine in China;
- stories of Chinese cuisine;
- names of Chinese dishes come from legends and stories;
- social conventions through daily food preparation in China;
- cooking methods and recipes;
- popular Chinese regional cuisines;
- dinning in a Chinese restaurant;
- conventions of diary entry and blog post writing.
g9_phase_3_mandarin_cuisine.pdf |
I hope this unit plan could be helpful to you and I welcome ideas to improve my unit. I would also like to invite you and encourage you to share your language acquisition unit plans. We can collect interesting topics to create language acquisition units that can be implemented in all languages. Teachers are designers, and we are each other's best resources.
Bank of MYP language acquisition units
- Using creativity to solve problems (English Phase 3) created by Rafael Angel et al.