Learning by sharing
I received an email from a language acquisition teacher a few days ago. She inquired about the possibility to exchange unit planners. She is the only language acquisition teacher at school and doesn’t have anyone to build language acquisition unit plans collectively. What a great idea! Language acquisition teachers are sometimes the minority at school, and they sometimes don’t have anyone to collaborate with and bounce ideas off. They want to improve their practice and will appreciate seeing some concrete examples to revise, refine and/or change the way they teach and plan. In education, we talked about the importance of providing exemplars to students a lot, and I think teachers can certainly benefit from seeing good (and bad) examples of unit plans.
My unit plan is undoubtedly not the best, but I am happy to share and receive feedback. Feedback from others often helps me expand my perspectives and inspires me with more innovative ideas. If You are reading this post, you are invited and encouraged to share. We sometimes are very critical of ourselves and worry that what we do might not be the best. The truth is that we always have room for improvement, and nobody can truly be the best or perfect. If we can all share one idea, we will have lots of great ideas. I am sharing one of my language acquisition unit plans to start this trend, learning by sharing.
Unit title: cuisine (Phase 1&3)
It is time-consuming and challenging to plan the unit when we have mixed language proficiency levels in the same class. I am sharing an MYP language acquisition unit plan with differentiated instructions for phase 1 and phase 3 students. This unit was implemented as the fourth unit (the last unit) in the second semester for grade 9 students. Therefore, students developed Chinese linguistic skills, knowledge, and understanding for the past seven months. Here is the statement of inquiry for this unit.
We explore Chinese cuisine through the lens of cultural heritage. This unit lasted for approximately 30 hours. Topics include:
- traditional and cultural trends through cuisine in China;
- stories of Chinese cuisine;
- names of Chinese dishes come from legends and stories;
- social conventions through daily food preparation in China;
- cooking methods and recipes;
- popular Chinese regional cuisines;
- dining in a Chinese restaurant;
- conventions of a diary entry and blog post writing.
I hope this unit plan could be helpful to you, and I welcome ideas to improve my unit. I would also like to invite you and encourage you to share your language acquisition unit plans. We can collect interesting topics to create language acquisition units that can be implemented in all languages. Teachers are designers, and we are each other’s best resources.
Bank of MYP language acquisition units
- Using creativity to solve problems (English Phase 3) created by Rafael Angel et al.
Hello, I can´t access the resources in the unit planner. Will you please it email it my way?
Hi Zeinab,
The unit plan provides an idea how it can be developed and designed. Regarding the resources, I am afraid that I can’t share with you as it involves copyright issues. Some of the texts were from different reading materials and revised based on textbooks.
Best,
Alison
Excellent work. It helped me understand the level of details that should be included on each unit planner. Is there any other unit planner that you can send me.
Hi Patricia,
Thank you for reading this and I am glad it’s helpful to you. The links of the texts included on the unit plan can’t be shared publicly as there are copyright issues. I will highly encourage you to design a unit independently and test out your ideas and understanding. 😀
Kindly,
Alison
Language Acquistion Hindi unit planner for Myp 1,Myp2,Mypj3
Hello Alison excellent page, congratulations, you do a great job thanks for sharing your ideas this does not help to grow. I am a Spanish teacher myp phase 1 and 2.
I love how the unit is structured, it is clear, quick to understand and totally complete. Very useful. I would like to use a format type like yours, could you help me or suggest me which format or where can I make one to put the details of my units?
sincerely, CA
Hi Claudia,
We use Managebac to record our MYP unit plans. You can downloaded the MYP unit plan template from MyIB and it is the same structure.
Best,
Alison
Thanks Alison for you reply me. I have the official IB template, i saw one that you used look great, it was a example that you share in g9_phase_3_mandarin_cuisine.pdf.
regards, Claudia
Thank you very much Alison.
You really showed me the right direction.
Maybe you can help me out on this also..
I would be helped a lot of I could read an exemple of a reading and or listening assessment.
What questions to ask to the different strands. And how to assess them
Topic or language is not important, It’s only to get an idea of how I should / could design, meeting the IB criteria
I am teaching Dutch at MYP5 phase 1 & 4
Dear Allison,
Your information has been of great help, since I am completely new at MYP. Thanks a lot.
I don’t see how this has enough modelling and input to lead to oral fluency….
Dear Allison,
Just to let you know that your post still helps new IB teacher in Chinese Language Acquisition like me to start off with a stronger view on how MYP lesson planner could be done. And again, I wish you all the best in life and thanks again for the great sharing.
Cheers~
Regards,
Dennis Tan.