Sample Visual Grammar Lesson

Here is a lesson plan for a demonstration lesson I taught recently. It was designed to show the Modelled, Guided, Independent lesson sequence to a group of teachers learning about teaching visual grammar using quality literature.

Year 2 demonstration lesson

The Nerdy Birdy by Danielle Wheeldon and David Snowden
Lesson Focus: How is the visual element of contact used along with the written text to engage the reader and help the reader to connect with the main character?	Outcome: EN1-4A draws on an increasing range of skills and strategies to fluently read, view and comprehend a range of texts on less familiar topics in different media and technologies Content descriptors: ·      use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to analyse texts by drawing on growing knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal text structures ·      identify visual representations of characters' actions, reactions, speech and thought processes in narratives, and consider how these images add to or contradict or multiply the meaning of accompanying words
Modelled	Explain Offer and Demand using poster. (Visual Grammar Poster Set)
Guided	Ask students to give an offer and a demand to a partner. Ask students to show how they might choose either an offer or demand to show they were worried, happy, excited, concerned.
During reading	Explain that the story we will read today uses this visual feature to show us how the character is feeling and to help us connect with and feel for the character. Read the story.
Guided	Classify examples of the illustrations of Ned as either Offer or Demand and speculate on how Ned feels at these parts of the story.
Independent	Match images of Ned to parts of the written text, in small groups. Conclude by sharing results of group work, explain the way both the image and words tell the story and drawing links between the use of offer and demand to help us connect with Ned.