A teacher shares a three-step routine for giving directions: state the task verbally, model it while speaking, then model it silently while students watch. This approach helps students who struggle with oral comprehension process instructions visually and kinesthetically.
Do you ever find yourself being really word heavy when you're giving directions? Me too. Let me tell you a simple trick that I used in the classroom to help keep my language as minimal as possible but help my students better understand what I was asking of them. So the first thing that I did was I would say what we were going to do. So I just pulled the vocabulary, um, spring vocabulary unit. Here's the anchor chart, here's Here's the student worksheet. What I want students to do is write the vocabulary word here. Simple enough, but it might be complex. So what I'm going to tell the learner is, we are going to find the matching picture and write the word. Then I'm going to say and do, "Ooh, I found the matching picture. Now I'm going to write the word," and I'm going to model it. Now I'm going to model it but with no language. Watch, I'll do it again. That 3-step process of saying, saying and doing, and then just doing allows the student to process in multiple different ways. So if your student processes language and oral communication very well, they'll pick up on 1 and 2. If they struggle with comprehension and direction following, which we know so many of our students do, having that explicit modeling twice and then once without any words will really benefit them.
