The General Idea of This Period
This is the third period of this unit. At the beginning of this period, the teacher should design some exercises to review what the students learned in the last period. The second period centers on the understanding of the passage First Impression. The teacher can begin with asking some questions or having a competition to make some sentences with “first impressions” according to the passage.
This period mainly deals with listening and speaking. At the beginning, teachers focus on training the Ss’ listening. This listening content is about living in “Wonderworld” and a new kind of quilt, which Xiao Feng has invented
.It can “think” for itself and become warmer or cooler according to the weather.
When training the Ss’ listening ability, teachers should start with pre-listening, that is lead-in. If it is necessary, teachers had better introduce some background knowledge about the listening material. After that, ask the students to predict what the following listening material may be about according to the given information. Teaching students to listen in a proper way is the aim of this activity. A good listener should be able to predict according to some hints such as the topic, the questions listed, etc., to listen with the purpose of finding useful information and to summarize. Later, let the Ss listen to it. At the same time, teachers should design some simple questions. After that, the Ss have known some about the listening material, and then teachers can ask them to listen to it again to be ready for more difficult questions. If necessary, the Ss can be given another time to listen. While practicing, teachers had better give students some advice on how to do it well. Certainly, suppose there are many new words and expressions, teachers deal with them firstly.
After practicing listening, the Ss are expected to learn some expressions about imagination. The topic is about what life will be like what life will be like in your hometown in 1000 years’ time. Later let the students work in pairs. Imagine you are two inventors and you have designed a new product, which you want to sell. First, you need to decide on your product. It can be anything that people might find useful in the future. It might save them time, make work easier or help in communication. Second, you will have to explain to the class exactly how your product works. It can use any branch of science. Third, you need to show that people will be willing to use it.
During the course, teachers should rank class activities from the easy to the difficult. First, ask them to learn the expressions. Then, ask them to imitate it to have a dialogue. Finally, the students are expected to create a dialogue or discuss the given topic, using the expressions about imagination.
This period lays emphasis on speaking and listening. The teacher should try his or her best to encourage
the students to say something. Don’t always correct the mistakes that the students would make while speaking. Otherwise, the students would feel reluctant to speak out their opinions.
