2 CLASS!!! My Redemption time

On Friday 22nd, I had my second chance with the basic group. Even though the activities worked well in the same time there was something inside of me that made me feel I did not give my 100%.

So, trying to avoid that sensation again, I bet to bigger and better ideas. I knew by hand that this time grammar was not to be taught; for that reason, I looked for different activities that could make them practice and be motivated in the different areas (VAKT)

First, I establish a little chitchat with my students; reminding them that it was the last day of classes and that later they would be free. Indeed, to me this works because it breaks the ice with students, making in them the confidence to participate in a more confident manner.

Later, I played the game “broken telephone”, using sentences which contained adverbs of frequency. I consider it is always good to make a little competition between the students because they want to do their best.

After that, I wanted to do something one of my classmates did, to incorporate a video related to the topic. So, I brought a video which contained, again, people who were speaking using the adverbs of frequency. To work on that, I provided my students with a sheet of paper with they have to fulfill with the information the video provided to them. This made them to be focused on the lesson and as well practice the listening skill.

This to me was a big challenge because I had never set an LCD projector by myself before. That’s why I arrived early to the classroom to see how I was to plug everything. At the very moment, I couldn’t, there was no signal and it was almost time, but I started pushing some buttons and at the end I could!!!. Now, I can surely say I learned something new.

Continuing with the class, I worked with the learning center strategy. There were 5 areas.

• Which is wrong (10 sentences with some grammatical mistakes. They had to identify the wrong ones)
• Where does the adverb go?  (They had a sentence and an adverb on parenthesis. They had to insert it on the previous sentence)
• Interview (they were to make questions of how often do you do ……)
• Arranging sentence (they had sentences like “ am/always/ late/to/I/class”, which they had to put in the correct order)
• Arranging the adverbs (they had strips of paper with the different adverbs taught in class. They were needed to locate the adverbs according to the frequency they occur)

In here, I wanted them to practice as much as they could, approaching different areas on them. What was kind of hard of this was to monitor all the groups working because they were separated, but I felt they enjoyed the activity.

To conclude the session, I gave the students a sheet of paper with a reading. They were supposed to underline the adverbs of frequency they found there. (There was no problem in it)

Basically, this class was about practice and reviewing the topic, but to me, this was the chance to redeem myself and do a better job.

Second Period!!, First class

Second Round of classes!!

In this period, I am teaching the basic group, again. You may think there’s no difference that perhaps is the same difficulty, the same issues, the same teaching approach I used with my previous group. Indeed, I can be really sure, from this experience, that each group is different, no matter if they are on the same level, as in this case, the way you are going to approach your students is really different.

Some of the characteristics of this group are:

• It’s a full girl group with only 1 boy in it.
•  Most of them if not all are repeating the same level again
• As the teacher commented to my partner and me, students do understand the classes, but they do badly in exams.
• They like to speak Spanish during the class.

So, knowing their background, I decided to plan activities which make them work.

The topic was adverbs of frequency.

The warm up I did was an activity that my partner developed with the other group, the new version of the hot potato (played as if it is an onion) the one who got the “Onion” had to answer the question in it.

Later, I started the presentation of the topic by listing some of the daily activities the students do. Then, I changed the sentence adding the adverb of frequency in it. This to me is more substantial because they see real examples made basically by them.

I gave them as well a mini chart with the list of adverbs and the percentage they have, so they could see clearly the ones they could use. Pronunciation of the adverbs was also taken into consideration.

I provided them some practices as well, to see if they had understood.

Later, I asked them to pass to the board and write some examples for the class.

At the end, I provided them some sentences as homework. They are going to be checked on Monday.