After a few minutes of thinking and planning, you can quickly and easily integrate a lesson plan that combines speaking and writing in a way that makes sense to your young learners, but is challenging enough to help them learn. As you can see, the two language skills associated with this communicative ability are speaking and writing; so these are the skills you need to integrate into your lesson. What does it mean to teach integrated skills? It’s practical and important to develop students’ language skills when several language skills are developed in one lesson. And while it’s nearly impossible to teach English without some integration of skills, careful planning for skill integration promotes healthy language development. A quick look at the list will help you find appropriate level tasks that can easily be integrated into the class to effectively develop both production skills. Information Deficit is an ideal integrated class for speaking and writing that also uses reading and listening skills. In Issue 4, Countdown, Sarah shows us how a toolkit can help you teach integrated skills. This type of integrated skills instruction is needed to help students successfully use their language skills outside of the classroom. Try the GSE Teacher Toolkit and download a copy of this simple lesson plan template to help you with focused planning and retrospective design. This will help you get an idea of the communication skills you want to develop, which is the first step in planning for skill integration. Once you have a clear idea of how these skills work together, it is easier to plan an integrated skills course. For example, can you imagine teaching a reading lesson without discussing the topic? How can you encourage your students to participate in writing assignments without brainstorming aloud? And speaking activities would be very difficult for students if they didn’t have notes to refer to. The GSE Teacher Toolkit makes it easy to integrate skills. Now you have everything you need to create high-quality integrated classes for your students. Imagine that you are planning a class for young students and want to practice the communication skills “Description.” You can look for different skills related to specific areas of communication at the most appropriate level.