LFO Teacher's Guide - Book - Page 23
While everyone is expected to be able to do the exercises with a half-full beaker, the more
able students should be encouraged to strive for the full beaker as well as the tasks that
appear on the blue right-hand side-bar on many pages of the Workbook as those are the most
advanced and challenging activities. You may wish to do a side-bar activity with the whole
class as many are rather enjoyable and amusing, giving all the students a chance to have a
little fun with English.
You will also find many suggestions for different activities at different levels scattered
throughout the Teacher's Guide. Remember, all the students could and should be involved.
These are some ideas for helping them all succeed. Feel free to add your own ideas and
expand on what was suggested here. Take advantage of all the extra ideas available to ensure
that all the students in your class are able to participate and enjoy the book.
Discussing Sensitive Issues
An additional issue that might come up in a heterogeneous class is the issue of children or
people who are different from ourselves. Perhaps there is a child in class who is overweight or
very short or tall, wears glasses, has a physical disability and so on. You will find characters
who are different in Let’s Find Out and you may wish to discuss the issue with the class. It’s
important to enable the students to express their views and to allow them to say what they
know and think without judgement. However, it is important to point out that we shouldn’t
judge people we don’t know based only on their looks.
ii. Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)
Let’s Find Out is designed to encourage and teach thinking skills: LOTS (Lower Order Thinking
Skills) and HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills). Keeping in mind the value of learning first and
then practicing frequently, the book is designed in such a way that the skills are re-entered
and recycled throughout the book.
The HOTS worked on in the book were chosen with the age group and the ability of the
students in mind. Each of these skills needs to be taught and practiced at the level of the
students in class. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that the students understand what the skill
entails and offer them an opportunity to succeed, even at the expense of accurate language
production. Often the use of L1 is acceptable, as long as the teacher reinforces it with the
English equivalent.
•
Predict As in real life, we make predictions about what we are going to read, what the
book will be about, what the headline means, what the title means, what the song is
really saying, etc. Thus, in order to connect real life skills such as predicting, the
students are asked to predict the upcoming events of the unit based on the
information given at the start of each section in each unit: the students are asked
questions that cause them to think about what might be coming up, what might
happen, how one thing connects to the next. Likewise for the reading passages; after
learning the new vocabulary, the students are asked to predict what will happen. This
enables them to guess and become involved, as well as to arouse their curiosity.
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