Earlier this Spring, the incredible Amelia Capotosta and team GYTO helped to bring live ELA lessons to thousands of educators and students across the country on Facebook live. These lessons, crafted around incredible mentor texts, featured high-yield literacy skills that span multiple grade-levels. We’re thrilled to be able to bring you some replays and resources from the ELA Live series and want to equip you with a few ways to (re)use them this school year!

Asynchronous Learning

If you are teaching in a hybrid or all-virtual environment, you likely have to plan for some level of asynchronous instruction. That may mean anything from 30-45 minutes of additional ELA content, to planning for contingencies such as technology failures or for substitute teachers. ELA Live lessons are perfect for asynchronous instruction as they’re led by expert teachers and designed with a virtual audience in mind.

Each ELA Live lesson is 25-30 minutes in length and includes a read aloud of the mentor text, followed by a mini-lesson teaching the focus skill. The mini-lesson aligns with student materials linked in the YouTube description that can easily be loaded into your LMS (learning management system) or used with the instructional technology of your choice. In addition to the student materials, you can use a tool like Nearpod to ensure that video itself is interactive.

Nearpod recently debuted its interactive video tool that allows you to embed YouTube videos into a Nearpod and create stopping points throughout the lesson replay that include opportunities for open-ended and multiple choice questions. This allows you to take advantage of the natural stopping points and “turn-and-talk” moments our ELA expert teachers have infused throughout their lessons to “check for understanding” with each of your students.

Exemplar for Students

We know that when students are able to teach a skill to someone else, they’re able to effectively communicate their mastery of that skill. We also know that students enjoy being able to take on the role of teacher or leader, particularly when they have some level of freedom of choice.

One innovative way to use our ELA Live lessons is to create a project for students in which they design and record their own ELA Live lesson, perhaps for a grade level below theirs. You can set whatever parameters you need based upon your unit of study - such as skill to be taught - while still allowing students the freedom of choice (with the mentor text they choose) and opportunity to express their creativity (through the lesson delivery).

Create a simple 3-2-1 rubric or checklist for students to refer to as they develop their own ELA Live lesson, with emphasis on the reading comprehension skill you’re assessing. You can then utilize the ELA Live lesson replay of your choice as an exemplar for students to not only review the skill(s) you’re asking them to teach, but also to help them generate ideas for their own lesson delivery.

Family Engagement

Home-school partnerships are more important than ever before, particularly with so many districts implementing hybrid or all-virtual environments. One area of need that we have heard from teachers and parents/caregivers alike is ELA support for families - opportunities for them to grow in their reading lives at home.

With family engagement events largely needing to be virtual to meet COVID-19 restrictions for gatherings, it can be a challenge to plan. Utilizing ELA Live lesson replays is a perfect way to provide families with models for effective read alouds that both engage students in the wonder of reading but also support skill development at home.

For example, you might schedule a reading night on Zoom and play pieces of an ELA Live lesson replay for parents/caregivers. Choose a few stopping points to talk about what the ELA expert teacher is doing to engage students as readers. You can share the GYTO website section for parents to direct them to other resources and more episodes of ELA Live that they can view for themselves, or with their child.

However you choose to utilize them, we hope you use the ELA Live lesson replays this year with your students or the children in your life! Our ELA expert teachers picked some amazing mentor texts to share, and chose some critical skills to teach. If you try one of our tips above, or have an ELA Live success story, we’d love for you to share in the comments or on social media!

How to Access ELA Live

You can access a playlist of ELA Live lessons right here on GYTO’s YouTube Channel. The first seven lesson replays are available now, with more to come! You can find a listing of the first seven lesson replays, including the mentor text and skill, below.