I created a powerpoint presentation (Appendix 1) to undertake the lesson. At the beginning of the lesson I re-introduced what a topic sentence is and introduced students to the “6 Characteristics of A Good Topic Sentence” to facilitate the teaching contents. I then grouped students randomly into four groups and started the “Terrific Topic Sentence” game. In groups, students need to answer questions to win points for their houses. There were three types of questions, listed in accordance to their difficulty levels. Since the final assessment is to write an article about the “wolf”, I decided to use an animal as the theme so that this activity can also serve as an model for informative writings about animals. I chose to write about “kangaroos” because they’re amazing animals unique to Australia and the fun facts about kangaroos will not only raise students’ interest but able enhance their understandings of Australia. Each question thus consist of one paragraph that it 's about one distinct feature of kangaroos. Each group had their own group colour and were given a whiteboard marker of that colour, and students need to come up to the board and write down their answers using their group marker. For the first two questions, students have to find and underline the topic sentence from a paragraph, and for the following two questions choose the best topic sentence for a paragraph …show more content…
First of all, after the activity student should have developed a solid understanding of topic sentences. However, students haven’t been given much chances to practise writing topic sentences individually. Giving students worksheets will further strengthen their individual writing skills, and teachers would be able to better access each students’ learning progress. This means teachers would be able to quickly identify weaker students who might need extra practices or scaffolding and better meet the learning need of each students. Nonetheless, as students already have a heavy loads of homework each day, I was advised by my mentor teacher not to give them extra