ET's Best Lesson

“Monkey Bites Prime Minister at Rock Concert”

For EL, I taught a Sec2 Express class for 9 periods every week. As with most classes, there was a wide range of learning styles and language proficiencies. Several of my students were foreigners, hailing from Hong Kong and Korea, to name a few. Perhaps more significantly, half the class was more comfortable with MT as their first language, and this was evident in both their verbal and written communication.

On Tuesdays, I had this class for the last hour of the school day. Having spent a glorious time cooking up a storm in the kitchen, I would find the students in a heightened state of activity after their Home Economics lesson. This inevitably took much time out of my EL lesson to settle the kids down, and made it virtually impossible to get them to focus on a “heavy” lesson.

 

Thus the Creative Writing workshop was born! (Much thanks to Emen and his “Friday Freeze”.) Even though I only managed to conduct two session of this workshop, I found the students responded very positively to this free-form writing program, as they were given much liberties in terms of choice in form, structure, style and (to a certain extent) content of their writing.

 

The second and last Creative Writing lesson was conducted in the week where my students were learning about Newspaper reports. Prior knowledge for the lesson encompassed students having been introduced to the basic structure and various language features of a newspaper report. The main purpose of this creative writing lesson was to test if students could actually apply what they had learnt into an actual writing task.

 

Students were suitably tickled by the given headline, “Monkey Bites Prime Minister at Rock Concert.” To provide some background information and context to their writing, I showed students some YouTube videos of Linkin Park’s and Green Day’s live performances. 

Prior to viewing these videos, the students were tasked to consider the guiding questions printed on their worksheet, and make notes of details answering the 5WH (Who, What, When Where, Why & How) of their newspaper report.

 

After this, my students worked on their storyboards. In planning for their article, some opted to write out bullet points instead of sketching a storyboard. I was flexible about the mode of planning, but emphasized the need to PLAN before their embarked on writing the actual piece.

I think one of the major learning points form this lesson was that students learn much better when they have a vested interest in their writing. The topic of their newspaper report was one that tapped into their interest for music, and so students were already well versed in the vocabulary and descriptive detail required in reporting about a rock concert.

 

Further, students knew that the most interesting and creative pieces of work would be displayed on the noticeboard. While students protested the notion of having their personal pieces up for public scrutiny, they were quickly won over by my insistence that they should be proud of their work, and allow their peers to learn from and appreciate their writing. I think that gave them an actual audience in mind for their writing, and gave them that added motivation to work on a piece of writing worthy of the praise of their classmates.