Description of a Lesson Activity to help English Learners develop language proficiency.

For this lesson activity, students will be required to find the area of composite shapes/figures provided
to them on a worksheet. They will be assigned to groups based off their zone of proximal development.
Students will have already be provided notes on finding the area of basic shapes like squares,
rectangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, triangles, semi circles, and circles. Students will be introduced to
the new lesson showing them how to find the area of composite figures. The teacher will go over
examples, utilizing geometry-related vocabulary, on the board, having students copy down each
example as the teacher is going over it. The teacher will hand out an additional handout to the EL
students, providing them with written step-by-step instructions/procedures to follow along with
additional examples.

The teacher will then have students get into their groups and handout the worksheet they are to
complete in their groups. The teacher will then play a video (www.khanacademy.com) for the students
to watch. She will replay the video. During this time, students will only be required to watch the video
and pay close attention to the example and explanations being provided. After finishing the video, the
students will be required to engage in the task assigned to them in their groups. They will be required to
verbally communicate their understanding of how to find the area of each composite shape. This will
require them to share how they see each shape and how they choose to break up each composite shape
in order to find the composite area. After finding each problem on the worksheet, students will be
required to write out how they found the area, explaining what basic shapes they found in the
composite shape. They will be required to utilize complete sentences. EL students will have already be
provided with sentence starters on the additional handout provided to them.