I recently discovered a website that's been making my life easier. It's called Lessonwriter.com, and it creates lesson plans and student worksheets for teaching English language skills from any reading passage. I wanted to teach a news article about China during the olympics. After finding the nike shox article I wanted, I cut and pasted it into LessonWriter. That took about 5 seconds. The site analyzed the article and let me select the grammar and vocabulary that my ESL students need while being creative with content. LessonWriter writes a lesson plan and a lesson that teaches the skills to understand the passage I chose - automatically!
I used to make educated guesses about which vocabulary words or grammatical points to teach. I would have a rough idea of which words students may find difficult and a hunch about what grammar was essential to understand the reading I had chosen. Now, LessonWriter takes the guesswork out of lesson planning and automates that work by matching the vocabulary to its academic word lists and student dictionaries and identifying which grammar points are most important for comprehension.
LessonWriter has many other features, as well: graphic organizers that increase reading comprehension by helping students connect ideas in a passage, word roots and stems exercises for vocabulary building, pronunciation exercises, crossword puzzles for review, and lots more. You can mix and match the lesson parts, using some or all of them. For some lessons I have just used the vocabulary feature, for example, and skipped everything else. Just that saves me a half hour of circling vocabulary and typing a word list. And the differentiated instruction options are amazing for doing group work in mixed-level classes!
I have been saving time with LessonWriter for ESL lesson planning and am recommending it to my content-area colleagues as well. At my school content-area teachers are always being asked to include literacy instruction and i think it's going to be helpful for that. Now the science teacher can include literacy instruction for her English language learners, too!
LessonWriter also keeps records of everything, including what standards a lesson addressed, and recommends what I should teach next. It's making my report-writing and grading a lot easier. The site if free. I highly recommend it.
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