Are you teaching English to young children and looking for a simple but powerful lesson framework that you can use and reuse productively? If you are, then you might consider using a technique called Hook Book Look Took.
HOOK
Children have a short attention span so teachers will need to think of ways to hook them i.e.,to get them to pay full attention during your lesson.
BOOK
One way to engage students is to organize your lesson around a story book. Children like stories, especially those that they are familiar with. You can read aloud the story to them, or better still, read it in a more interactive manner so that students are fully engaged.
LOOK
There may be some important language points (e.g., spelling, pronunciation etc) that you want to teach in your lesson. This is where you teach them. But do it briefly and don’t turn it into an extended grammar lesson. The students will get bored.
TOOK
Before you end your lesson, briefly summarize the key learning points of your lesson. You can use a song, nursery rhymes etc to reinforce the key takeaways of the lesson.
To learn more about this simple but powerful lesson structure, click on the link here: HOOK BOOK LOOK TOOK.
More reading
Are our students critical?
Feedback that propels Learning
This is a good technique that primary schools have adopted in their Stellar English programme.
A song or video related to the book is used as a hook and after which, students will read the book with the teacher, looking out for key words and pictures in the book. Once the reading is done, teachers normally ends the lesson with a summary of the key learning points and gets students to complete a post-activity like a worksheet to check for students’ understanding.
Overall, this lesson framework feels very similar to that of the SBA (Shared Book Approach) and utilizes similar theories and principles from that approach.
In terms of theories, I would say that it utilizes language theories like the noticing, input, genre and lexical models as students use language as well as their prior knowledge to notice, comprehend and make meaning of the words and pictures in the book and teacher will briefly bring students’ attention to important language or lexical points. In addition, teacher reading-aloud the text in the book helps to model the character reading skills to students, enabling the language input to be clearer and more comprehensive.
Some principles behind this teaching idea include reading for enjoyment and comprehension as well as using meaningful and interesting literature to hook and teach students as students are more inclined to notice and learn from texts that they find relevant and to their liking. Furthermore, there is some level of process orientation as the teacher is modelling how to read-aloud so that students can emulate and ultimately learn how to read in a similar manner as the teacher.
Thanks for the brief but meaningful article
it is quite useful and easy to apply!