I fear that in the past I make have felt that a lesson was poor if it contained only one resource. Surely, a lesson with one resource was boring and tedious and would not allow my students to make progress. I have a few lessons under my belt now and I know better. When I plan, I start with my objective - what do I want to have achieved by the end of my lesson? What do I want my students to learn?
Take for example my first lesson back with my year 8. I knew that I wanted my students to have revised 'er' verb endings and that I also wanted to feed in aller and some new vocabulary that they would be meeting in subsequent lessons. This was a first lesson, a chance to dust away cobwebs and give students a chance to practise their French. Thus I put together the following paragraph.
I had plenty of ideas of how I could proceed with this paragraph which included creating many further resources. However, reminding myself to keep my goal in mind my lesson (35 minutes) looked like this.
1. I read the paragraph.
2. we read together
3. I read the text and stopped in certain places, students then had to say the next word.
4. Students did the same thing in pairs.
5. I read the text and students had to stand up when they heard a verb.
6. Students highlighted the verbs.
7. Through guided questions we worked out as a class that all of the verbs were 'er' verbs and we also reminded ourselves of the subject pronouns, which we wrote down.
8. Students worked in pairs to figure out the verb endings and wrote these down next to the subject pronouns.
9. Students chose a couple of the verbs and wrote them out in full.
10. I dictated some sentences based on the text above with the verb missing which students had to fill in. To make it harder I left a little wait time before they could write down the sentence, which is an activity that they always enjoy.
Finally, because there was a little time at the end, I wrote out a couple of sentences in English based on the text but changing the subject pronouns and got the students to translate.
Et voilà! That's it. Students made progress and achieved what I wanted them to achieve and I had not spent long prepping the lesson. The added bonus was that with tasks like finishing my sentences, standing up when they hear the verb, and the delayed dictation (a steal from Gianfranco Conti).
Let me know your favourite 'one resource lesson' in the comments below.
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