Crafting Your Narrative: A TEDEd Lesson

Crafting Your Narrative: A TEDEd Lesson

This week, I had the opportunity to explore TEDEd again and created my first personalized lesson plan for first year EFL college students entitled: Crafting Your Narrative: Using the Past Continuous Tense (Unit 2). I decided to choose the grammar point: the past continuous verb tense (aka, the past progressive). My EFL learners are just completing the second unit of our writing class, which is a beginner’s level chapter teaching the craft of writing a narrative. Most of the learners are able to easily write in the simple past, so I wanted them to see how they could incorporate the past continuous in their narrative assignments.

Language Learning Objectives of My TEDEd Lesson:

• By the end of the lesson, my students should be able to:
• Define the past continuous and identify its structure.
• Differentiate between the simple past and the past continuous.
• Recall when to use the past continuous.
• Compose sentences using the past continuous accurately.

How will I test to see if these learning objectives are met? 

I love the options registered users are given to create a lesson on TEDEd. There are various forms of assessments that a teacher can choose from, such as multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and discussion boards. I assigned my students 7 multiple-choice questions based on the video they are required to read, which are all aligned to my lesson’s language objectives. Additionally, I provided my students 2 links to articles/stories that further explain the past continuous and give examples of how this tense is used in a narrative. Lastly for the discussion board, I asked my learners to explain the benefit of using this tense in their narratives and suggested that they provide me examples of how they may use it in their first narrative writing assignment (that is actually due next week!). In their final narrative writing assignments, I can further see if they are able to compose sentences using the correct structure of the past continuous in the proper context. I hope my students find this TEDEd lesson beneficial.