Total Physical Response Lessons

Total Physical Response, also known as TPR, lessons are a nice way of introducing emergent bilinguals to the interaction within their new language. TPR lessons consist of the teacher giving direct commands in that students' targeted language. They will usually enact a lot of gestures, repetition, visuals and realia. The lessons are called TPR's because when the student responds to the commands it causes a response that is totally physical. These lessons do not require the student to participate, but because of the repetition, slow pace, interacting visuals and realia the student usually ends up joining. Below in an example of a TRP lesson that I created. It is a lesson centered around teaching k-2 aged children about the emotions experienced in school.

T.P.R. (Total Physical Response) Lesson Plan

CELP/WIDA Standard(s):

Social and Instructional language

Content Area and Grade:

Comprehensive Health and Physical Education

State standard:

Standard 3. Emotional and Social Wellness in Health

Evidence outcomes:

a. Identify a variety of emotions (DOK 1)

Topic/Focus:

Emotions associate with school.
The different feelings that can be experienced while in school, or the emotions that need to be able to be expressed while in school.

ESL Level:

Level 1 (This lesson plan is designed for beginners only, they are NOT expected to talk. They show what they know through gestures.)

ELL Objectives:

After a lesson on emotions, students will be able to

Target Vocabulary:

Commands:

“Show me.../gesture”
“Touch/point to”

Vocabulary words:

Happy
Sad
Nervous
Excited
Confused

Materials/Props Needed:

Emotion chart with extensive amount of emotions
Pictures of the emotions with faces showing the emotion clearly with different corresponding colors
Colored pencils

Anticipatory Set:

What emotion are you feeling chart. Bring out a chart with a bunch of different emotions and ask everyone what emotion they are feeling right now.

Ask them to use the colored pencils to chose a color that represents the emotion and color it in. Then I will share what emotion everyone chose, the colors they chose and the way they decided to color it.

Direct Instruction/Modeling/Demonstration:

I will begin by showing an emotion on my face with a hand gesture. I will smile and repeatedly point to my smile while saying the word happy. I will then point to the picture of the face that is happy. I will alternate between smiling and gesturing and pointing to the picture. I will begin to introduce new emotions and hand gestures, while going back and practicing the ones I have just taught. For example I would have them practice happy and sad before teaching them nervous.
I will do this for every emotion until I have shown the students the hand gestures and picture for every emotion. I will then start to say the emotions without any gestures and see if the students either point to the picture or do the gesture themselves. If they do not do either I will go back to doing the hand gesture with them and pointing to the pictures.

Checking for Understanding:

Students will make gesture when teacher states an emotion
Students will point to appropriate facial expression picture when teacher says emotion

Extra practice and Assessment:

Students will create gestures for other emotions we have not talked about on the emotion chart from the anticipatory set.
They will each create a gesture for the emotion they chose to color during the anticipatory set and the entire group will practice them while also practicing the emotions and gestures learned previously.

Closure:

The students will make the gestures and point to the pictures when the teacher gives the command of the emotion.

These are some of the images I used in my lesson. The faces were colored with different corresponding colors and used for visuals, while the emotion chart was used during the anticipatory set.