GRAMMAR :S a difficult but great experience

On Tuesday 7th, I had my second chance with the advanced II group. This time was even challenging for me since I did not have much time to prepare myself, and that was not all. The teacher indicate me that I had to prepare a class based on the book (as the previous one), but I had to add the grammar part.

This made me feel somehow nervous because the topic was “Type of Sentences”. I had some notion about them, but, indeed, I had to read to get familiarized with the topic; besides, I had to prepare the lesson (the way the class was to be developed)

Somehow is challenging, but I think we have to be able to work under pressure.

Since I knew I did not had the time to develop a 5 minute warm up, I just greet the students and I tried to activate their schema by pasting a quote that I love. “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you will feed him for a life time”

I'm used to prepare more elaborate warm ups, but I consider this kind of groups are very communicative, an advantage I needed to take advantage of.

They enjoyed that moment because they could express their ideas freely. 

Then, I worked with the activities in the book (compound nouns). There were 5 exercises related to that topic. As I considered working only with the book kind of monotonous (it can be seen in students face), I took one activity from the book and make it sort of different. The activity was to discuss in pairs some of the compound nouns. What I did was to paste those compound nouns in some of the desks the students will sit later. (Of course I did it before they came to the class). They were surprised and nervous to see who were the ones to explain those nouns to the whole group.

I could see students enjoyed it. This made me feel good because I could add a touch of me in those activities. 

Later, we work on a listening which was not a complicated task for them.

Then, the part that was a challenge for me arrived, Grammar.  I said it was a challenge because I had to be really secure, confident, and even ready for any question that could appear; besides, this was a topic that was sort of confusing to me when I was taking grammar and composition.

The way I presented the sentences was through different charts since I had to explain the 4 types of sentences, simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.

For me, it is important to add that funny sense to those critical moments. How come you may say….well, the sentences I prepared were related to soccer, different interest, and topics that students find appealing and meaningful. We were jocking during the class while we were making those sentences together.

It was a nice process because they helped me to add the adequate coordinated conjunction, to identify the subordinating sentence, and many other different things. Over all, I had fun and I enjoyed the moment as the 50 minutes passed so fast.

On the feedback, I was told that when students come late I should be more careful and make them part of any activity I am developing in that moment; besides, the fact of making the class interactive allow me to have students on my side, paying attention, and working with me. Some words pronunciations were corrected as well, which I consider important because we are not perfect and we have always something to be improved.

So many contents developed that day, and it is funny we could work them all.

This group is nice to work with…just one more class left and I don’t want to leave ehehehehehe.

Have a nice day guys!!!.