Here is a lesson plan that was created to be the capstone for my first course in TESOL methods. I completed all the work for the creation of this lesson alone. 

Please have a look at the lesson plan by clicking the link below.

Robidoux Learning Segment Spring 2014.doc

This learning segment consists of five days of lessons all based upon a central question: Do animals show emotions the same way that humans do?

For students to answer the question I found content and materials available at National Public Radio and then created the learning segment.

For the first day's listening lesson students will watch and listen to this Stella Artois beer commercial about a perfectionist: Rufus the Hawk. 

For the lesson the students will watch the video two times without sound to create a sense of intrigue. After this muted viewing, students are given time to think about the content they have seen and I will elicit their ideas about what they suspect about the language content of the commercial.

I would like to address that although using a beer commercial to teach English to children may seem questionable if you watch the video clip you will see that there is no imagery of alcohol in the main segment and the true focus of the commercial is the humorous personification of a trained hawk named Rufus.

Please take a moment to watch the video and see for yourself.

After watching the commercial a few times and completing a cloze worksheet to become familiar with the target language forms for this segment. Students will then listen to this NPR news piece to become more familiar with who Rufus is and why his story is interesting. 

This interview will be used again in the following day's speaking lesson.

Please click below to listen to the interview.

For the second day's lesson students will be practicing speaking.  Students will listen to the interview from NPR  again and then practice in small groups reading the interview with a partner from both the role of the interviewer and interviewee. For this day's lesson some students will be invited to dramatically read their interview on 'TV'. I will use the in-class smart board technology and a web cam to simulate a news segment.  I will project students onto the smart board so that they can perform these speech acts for their classmates.  Part of my intention with this activity is that by having the students projected upon the smartboard they may feel more comfortable and even be more excited about reading before the class.  This element of the learning segment not only adds drama and fun to the class but will help students to make connections between the skills we are practicing and real life applications for the skills they are learning and will apply to the writing portion of the learning segment.

Here is a link to the text of the interview.

Pigeons Fly In Fear: NPR transcript.pdf

On the third day students will be reading an NPR article that was adapted from the previous two day's interview written and spoken materials.  By this time in the learning segment students will have become familiar with content because they have been listening,  speaking and reading about the interview.  In this day's lesson we will read the news article that was written using the interview.

Here is a link to the article written from the interview.

Pigeons Fly In Fear: NPR reading article.pdf

On the fourth and fifth days of this learning segment students will be writing. They will use interview techniques learned in the first three days' lessons to gather opposing and complementing viewpoints from their peers and then use that information in their writing.  Students will also write to explain their opinion and try to think from the point of view of some of the characters from the news content we have been using all week.