21 Century lesson Plan

1. Title: Restaurant

2. Level: 5^th grade students, Mandarin beginning learners

3. Goals:

     Do: Students will be able to order foods in a Chinese restaurant and create their own restaurant menu.

     Know: 

• l  The learner will be familiar with the vocabulary of foods and drinks.
• l  The learner will review the expression ways of money.
• l  The learner will learn the sentences of ordering foods in a restaurant.

     Set: Create a three-min video about ordering foods in a Chinese restaurant.

4. Learning and teaching strategies:

Day 1: menu (Google Doc)

• l  Students search the authentic menu of a restaurant in China on Internet and discuss the components of the menu: the names of foods and drinks as well as their prices.
• l  Students review the foods and drinks vocabulary by playing games on Quizlet.
• l  Divide the students into groups of 4 and have them choose their own role and responsibility: student A works on the names of the foods, B works on the prices of the foods, C works on the names of the drinks and D works on the prices of the drinks.
• l  Review the Google Doc skills with students and encourage them work together to create a menu with Google Doc.
• l  Stress the importance of cooperation and instruct each group to decide on their restaurant’ name and their team name.

Day 2: script (Google Doc)

• l  Provide feed back of their menu creating and have kids to some necessary improvements.
• l  The teacher shows a video clip of ordering foods in a restaurant and has kids practice and translate the dialogues.
• l  Review the expressions “What would you like to eat/drink?”, “I would like ~”
• l  Students will continue working as groups to create a script of ordering foods in a Chinese restaurant with Google Doc.

Day 3: I-movie or Go Animate Videos

l  After practice and rehearsal, each group could choose to create a video of ordering foods in mandarin with either I-movie or Go Animate.

Day 4: Closure

• l  Students watch other groups’ videos and give feedbacks to each other.
• l  Show the original video again and remove the sounds, have kids to try to dub it.
• l  Encourage the kids to have a dinner in a local Chinese restaurant and order foods for families.

The middle school I teach has just started the one to one laptop program last year. Both of my students and I are very excited about it. I used to have the students work on the project of ordering foods by doing role-play. And this year, I’m planning to encourage them use I-movie or Go Animate to create the video.

The goal of the unit project is that students will be able to order foods in a Chinese restaurant. In this sense, it has real life purposes and it also requires problem-solving skills. Besides, the students need to create their own restaurant menu. I let them imagine that one day if they want to open a restaurant in China, no matter offering Chinese foods or American foods, their restaurant needs to be authentic and localized to be accepted and popular.  By giving them some websites, they could find the menus of KFC, McDonalds and Starbucks in China. After discussion and research, they would figure out the ways that these American restaurants made themselves localized. For example: the translation of the dishes’ names, the prices and choices. And further, they are encouraged to use the similar ways to localize their restaurants.

In addition, as Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) indicate, the use of digital technologies (such as Google Doc, Quizlet in the lesson plan) change the classroom model into learning environments that embrace changes as students are able to learn, research, and play using digital tools. These tools really make learning fun and efficient for them.

The reason of giving the choices of I-movie and Go Animate is that some students are very active and love to act out and share what they have learned while some are a little bit shy or artistic and prefer to perform in another means. In this way, each student could create their project by designing their own experiment and learn from each other by sharing and giving feedbacks.

 

Reference:

Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand, Oaks, CA: Corwin/Sage.

Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky: CreateSpace?.