This lesson is on a Fantasy Vacation. It utilizes Google Earth. This assignment allows student flexibility to learn about a new location of their choice, conduct some basic research and provide information on what they learned after they explore pre-selected locations. This lesson is designed for students to work individually, however, depending on the need of your students, you could assign this assignment to a pair of students or a group. 

Hi! My name is Pili Lee and I am a Speech-Language Pathologist. Everyday, I work with students on practicing their speech or language skills. Overtime, when students are close to reaching mastery, we often shift to practicing in a more natural and unstructured setting to help them generalize their skills outside of speech therapy activities. Although there are many different things we can do, I recently learned about “genius hour” and especially love the idea of helping my students discover and learn more about things they are interested in or passionate about. When my students get to work on things they love and are excited about, not only does it keep them motivated to practice their speech and language skills, it also prepares them to communicate well when it comes time they get to share what they love and know about in everyday life. Image created by Pili Lee using Canva

This lesson plan is applied to the very first lesson of the Mandarin Matrix textbook of the sixth grade DLI Chinese course. This lesson plan can give you some ideas for teachers teaching this course in their first year.