Paper Example on Fairy Tales: A Lesson Plan for Improving Reading and Listening Skills

Introduction

Folktales are significant in helping young children improve listening or reading skills. They can also help children understand cultures, model characters, and understand their love for stories. Folktales involve stories that spark the interest of children by engaging them in stories of diverse traditions. There are many forms and genres of folktales in Malaysia, including animal stories, fables, fairytales, myths, and urban legends. This essay will document a lesson plan for using fairy tales to teach young children. The purpose is to expose students to the basic knowledge of teaching young children.

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Part 1: Lesson Plan

School: Tadika Junior in Melaka

Class: The lesson plan is for preschool students. The class teacher, Ms Ana, will take the students through the lesson.

Children's Age Group: Three To Six Years Old

Focus: The lesson is meant to use fairytales to teach and improve English Speaking for preschool students. The fairytales use speaking animals to teach vocabulary lessons to the children.

Moral values: The essence of the folk tales is to teach children valuable moral values such as sharing, courage, and honesty.

Date/Time: The lesson will be on February 28th, 2020, beginning at 9.00 am and ending at 9.30 am.

Duration: 30 minutes

Learning Materials: The teacher will use a Malaysian folk tale book with multiple stories to engage the students and help them master the English language. The fairytale used in this lesson plan will be 'The Cunning Mousedeer' by Kay Lyons and Illustrations by Martin Loh. The learning materials include fairytale storybooks, crayons, and manila papers for drawing illustrations of animals after reading and flashcards of scenes from the story to help the children remember (Bertrand, n.d).

Learning objectives: The aim of the fairytale is reading or listening to the tales for educational and entertainment purposes. Goals include learning new vocabularies such as food, clothes, or body parts from the folktales, for the students to hear in English what is familiar in their language, to allow the children understand English in an imaginative context, to help the older children understand past tense and comparatives, to promote the children in appreciating the entertainment value of fairytales, helping the children understand their culture, and reinforcing the group's identity.

Implementation

Set Induction

Ms Ana will begin by asking the students what they know about fairy tales. The teacher will ask the students to give a few examples of fairy tales they know. The teacher will explain what a fairy tale is and then proceed to read the story of The Cunning Mousedeer. When reading the story, the teacher plans to engage in eye contact with the students to ensure they are following the story. The teacher plans to use non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, tonal variations, and gestures to illustrate the story and make it more captivating to the children. The teacher will take note not to overdo the scary characters in the story. The teacher plans to involve the children as much as possible such as getting them to guess the next episodes in the story. The teacher will tell the children that they will discuss the story after she finishes reading. They will explain what the story was about, what deeper meaning the story was trying to convey, and a discussion of the characters present in the story.

Introduction

During the lesson, the teacher will explain what a fairy tale is and why they were written. The teacher will explain that a fairy tale is a story written for children and that they were written for children to understand new vocabularies, and also to get entertained. The teacher will explain whether fairy tales were first written or told by mouth. The teacher will give instances where fairy tales were told long ago, such as at home in their language before children went to bed. The teacher would explain why fairy tales were so popular and why they are being used today. The teacher does not need to systematically pre-teach vocabulary; they can use the pictures in the book to determine the student's comprehension of specific vocabularies. For instance, the teacher can ask the children what emotions the animals depict in the pictures or asking who some of the characters are by pointing at them. All this information is critical for the children to understand fairy tales, pay attention to them, and appreciate what they are trying to teach.

Learning/Play Activities

To make the fairytales captivating for the children, the teacher should use structured and unstructured play to engage the children in the story. Unstructured play includes, for instance, when reading the story of the cunning mousedeer, the teacher would engage the children by asking them to dramatize what sounds some of the animals in the story make. This will keep the students involved in the story and wanting to hear more. Unstructured play may also include dress-up activities directed by the teacher to mimic the animals in the story.

For structured play, the teacher can give the children crayons and papers and ask them to draw a portion of the fairytale (Scholastic, n.d). Structured activities can also include games that follow directions from the story, for instance, engaging the children to dramatize how the animals were walking. The teacher will tell the students that their drawings will be combined to form a fairytale book for the class. The teacher can invite the children to create their fairytales after finishing the story. Easy topics for the children include why the moon comes out at night or where rainbows come from. To help the children understand vocabulary, the teacher can ask the children to note down names from vocabulary groups they hear in the story. For instance, the children can write family groups such as sister, father, godmother, or clothing groups such as trousers, dresses, and shoes. The teacher can emphasize language learning areas such as past tense. For instance, in the story, the mousedeer waved. The teacher can emphasize that waved is the past tense of waving and show it with illustrations.

Reinforcement and Conclusion

The teacher should reinforce the understanding of the children through motivation. The teacher can make the class clap for the student who answers questions. This action will motivate the other students to pay attention and try answering questions. To ensure the children understood specific vocabularies, the teacher can ask, for example, who the mousedeer was related to and what their relationship was like. This would help the children understand family vocabulary. The teacher would inquire whether the students understood tenses and repeat where necessary to ensure the students comprehend past, present, and future tenses. The lesson plan integrates play with learning materials to ensure the students remain engaged and understand what the teacher is trying to pass across. The use of fairytales is one of the most significant ways of teaching new vocabularies to children.

Part 2: Teaching Demonstration

Introduction

Effective teaching methods apply pedagogical knowledge as it involves the practices and principles of teaching. Pedagogy is defined as a teaching method that combines skills and abilities in the policies of teaching, classroom management, application of technologies, learning styles, and teaching assessment (Iksan, Mahmud, & Zakaria, 2014). Children have a limited attention span; therefore, classroom management involving collaborations between teachers and students is vital. The teacher will read out the story and ask the students relevant questions relating to the story. The preschool mode of teaching is supportive and nurturing rather than competitive. The teacher will, therefore, give the students equal opportunities to answer the questions from the story. This may include asking a child a question without having them raise their hands.

Knowledge

A comprehensive teaching model combines elements of teaching knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Masnan, Anthony, & Zainudin, 2019). Teachers should be alert towards their pedagogical needs to understand the needs of students. Preschool teachers in Malaysia should familiarize themselves with the National Preschool Curriculum Standard (KPSK). In Malaysia, the modes of teaching preschool children include pre-active, interactive, and post-active stages of teaching (Masnan, Anthony, & Zainudin, 2019). To ensure the children learn effectively, the teacher will use group learning for all the children. Given the preschool students of Tadika Junior are listening to a fairytale, the teacher would use group learning to promote the children's social skills. Through teaching the fairytale, the teacher aids the children in learning how to communicate and create harmonious social relationships (Alpine Montessori, 2017).

The Malaysian teaching standard requires teachers to cover aspects such as practicing professional teaching vales, exhibiting knowledge and understanding, and exercising teaching skills (Masnan, Anthony, & Zainudin, 2019). A crucial missing piece of pedagogical teaching practice involves teacher knowledge of what needs to be taught and the relationship between knowledge and teaching that is beneficial to students. Teacher knowledge involves known and acquired information from experience, observation, and learning through the senses. Teachers should possess a diverse understanding of the essential contents that need to be taught to the children.

Use of Materials/Demonstration

In Malaysian schools, learning through play (LTP) introduced by the National Preschool Curriculum (NPC) is considered an essential part of childhood learning (Li, 2016). LTP is a teaching demonstration that has been adopted in the preschool school curriculum that demonstrates the health benefits of offering a healthy mix of play and child-initiated discovery learning (Li, 2016). Learning through play involves the physical environment, which leaves lasting impacts on children's cognitive and socio-emotional development. LTP is categorized into two schools of thought, one, free play where the children are allowed to choose activities, and the second, structured play where the teacher determines the activities to engage the children.

The materials teachers can use to engage the attention of the children includes pictures that convey a story. The teacher can use activity sticks to show the children some of the topics covered or some of the new vocabulary they have learned. The activity sticks have words written on a piece of paper and stuck on the sticks. Children can also engage with material made from wood, fabrics, and paper. The teacher can also incorporate texts, videos, and other materials to help the students learn the curricula as stipulated by NPC.

From the lesson plan documented in part 1, I have prepared a video recording of the story. The cunning mousedeer to showcase teacher demonstration. The video has been uploaded to YouTube, and the link to the video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zabebvee9U&feature=youtu.bePart 3: Reflection Report

Reflective Account

The lesson plan for Tadika Junior preschool students is necessary for planning the objectives and outcomes of the lesson. The lesson plan is essential for giving the teacher a step by step guide to follow and the materials to use when teaching the students English using a fairytale story. Lesson planning answers the questions; what am I teaching? Who am I teaching? How will I teach it? Do my students understand? The structure of the lesson plan aids the teacher in identifying better methods for increasing student engagement and comprehension. To come up with suitable objectives for the lesson plan, the teacher should ask questions such as; what is the...