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How to Teach English to Kids

Teaching English, or Language Arts, can be challenging. An English teacher must teach a wide range of skills, from reading critically to writing, and this can be daunting, particularly if you have a class of struggling students. The most important and helpful tools for any teacher are well-written lesson plans. For English teachers, who usually don't have the structure of textbooks and often don't have a detailed curriculum to work from, lesson plans are vital. Aligning your lesson plans to state standards and essential questions will guide you in your teaching and will support your students in their learning.

Instructions

- 1
  Review the content standards for your state. Record the standards that apply to the grade level that you teach on a piece of paper or computer document. Keep these wherever you do most of your lesson planning. Use these standards as a guide. Consider them long term goals to reach.
- 2
  Read through your school's curriculum for the grade you teach. This should provide some scope and sequence to what you should be teaching. Create your own curriculum around the books required by your school if your department does not have a sufficient or complete curriculum. Use the state content standards to direct the curriculum.
- 3
  Create essential questions if your school does not provide them. Use the state standards to help you shape the essential questions. For instance, a state standard may be: "The student will use language to communicate meaningfully with others". Tailor this standard to an essential question like: "What is language and how does it help us communicate? What is communication?".
- 4
  Use the standards and essential questions to guide your unit plans. Select the book you will be teaching to your students and align the themes and content of the book to your essential questions and state standards.
- 5
  Build your lessons around the themes you've identified from the book. Continue to align your lesson content to the essential questions and state standards.
- 6
  Devise learning goals or targets for each lesson as well as assessments of learning. Each learning goal should be measurable and the assessments should line up with each goal to check for student understanding. Make sure your learning goals are in alignment to the state standards.
- 7
  Create learning activities that will help the students gain facility with the content. Align the learning activities to the content and themes of the novel you are teaching. Make the learning activities fun. Consider group activities, student-lead discussion, formal debate and in class group reading. Check for understanding and model difficult skills such as asking advanced questions, making inferences or interpreting meaning.

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