74 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
In Figure 5-7, I show some words for weather and how they’re related. You
could elicit from the students a temperature for each box, for example.
Figure 5-7:
Diagram
demonstrat-
ing how
weather
words relate.
boiling hot warm mild
cool cold freezing
So, the way you organise words on the board can show a hierarchy or a scale
from most to least, best to worst and so on.
Depending on the topic, you can draw a chart or label a diagram to give visual
input. For grammar presentations, charts and equations are very common.
In a lesson about asking questions, you can lay out the structure on the board
this way:
Question word + Auxiliary verb + Subject word + Infinitive verb
How does he travel?
Why can Roger eat?
Where will the girls stay?
Try to keep talking as you write on the board. Otherwise the atmosphere in
class goes flat because of the silence and the fact that your back is turned. The
students may also get up to mischief if you don’t keep them busy so it’s a good
idea to elicit as you write.
Doing Concept Checks
It’s never useful to ask students if they understand. After all, how do they
know whether they’ve misunderstood until they end up getting it wrong? So
instead, you need to find out by getting the students to demonstrate under-
standing, usually through concept check questions. Concept check questions
are questions that test understanding. For example, a concept check question
for the word ‘breakfast’ is ‘What time do people usually eat breakfast?’ The
student is only likely to get the answer right if he understands that breakfast
is a morning meal.
