<p><strong>What: </strong>It's a reading class about a thank-you letter written by Ben Smith, a disabled person, to Miss. Li of the Animal Helpers organization. It mainly tells the moving story between Ben Smith and his helper dog Lucky. Ben described many inconveniences in his life before Lucky and the great help Lucky brought to his life after he came, fully showing the great changes in Ben's life under the help of charitable organizations and kind-hearted people.</p> <p><strong>Why:</strong> The author's intention is to cultivate students' emotional attitude of caring for others and being willing to help others, enable them to know more about the difficulties of the disabled, arouse their compassion and enhance their motivation of participating in volunteer activities.</p> <p><strong>How:</strong><strong> </strong>The text adopts the genre of thank-you letter for narration, which can be divided into three parts: the first part (paragraph 1) mainly explains the reason for writing the thank-you letter and introduces the background information; the second part (paragraphs 2-3) mainly narrates Ben Smith's story, comparing the many inconveniences in his life before Lucky came and the great changes in his life after Lucky came; the third part (paragraph 4) mainly expresses Ben Smith's gratitude to Miss. Li.</p>

<p>Key points:</p> <ol> <li>Learn and master new words and phrases: city, cheer, volunteer, notice, lonely, clean up, give out, cheer up, make a plan, make some notices, come up with, help out, care for, used to&hellip;.</li> <li>Be able to read articles accurately and fluently, and retell the article.</li> <li>Understand the structure and format of letter of thanks, and learn to use letter of thanks to express gratitude.</li> <li>Cultivate the excellent qualities of gratitude towards others, protecting animals, and giving back to society.</li> </ol> <p>Difficult points:</p> <ol> <li>Analyze the key and difficult words as well as their parts of speech in the text.</li> <li>Guide students to master methods for analyzing the main idea and structural framework of an article.</li> <li>Help students learn to express themselves and engage in topic discussions: how to express gratitude and narrate their own experiences.</li> </ol>

<ol> <li>The <strong>basics</strong> of the class: there are 68 students in the class and they are arranged in three big groups in the classroom. It seems that most students don&rsquo;t like having English classes.</li> <li>The class <strong>routine</strong>: It seems that the students don&rsquo;t read the text adequately. The teacher presents so many new words in the text that it may overwhelm the students. Instead of getting the students to figure out the implied meaning of the passage, the teacher herself tells the students about it directly.</li> <li>The classroom<strong> interaction</strong>: It seems the teacher doesn&rsquo;t make use of the information gap to help students understand the text. She just helps the students understand the text by asking questions and explaining new words. She asks questions to the whole class, and just a few students answer. When no response from the students, the teacher answers the questions by herself.</li> <li>The main <strong>problems</strong> of the class: Ss are not good at reading. T doesn&rsquo;t give enough opportunities for Ss to read the text by themselves. It seems that most Ss are absent-minded in class. T doesn&rsquo;t seem to try hard enough to design the reading tasks helping Ss understand the details and the implied meaning of the text.</li> </ol>