New Period, New Group!!!

On Friday 3rd I had my first experience with the advanced group.

The previous times, I was working with the basic groups; something that made me had the costume of working in an specific way. (a lot of TPR activities, dynamic classes, etc.) This was indeed, one of the most worrying weeks I have had in my teaching practicum. Knowing this group has a different English level, I had to approach them in a different way; besides, the topic they were studying contains a big difficulty to my point of view. The topic was participle clauses.

From the beginning, I greeted, and let them know the way we were to work. I also consider that calling students by their names is important, so I brought some pieces of paper in which they wrote their names.

In my class, what I wanted to do was to make them speak; for that reason, in the warm up I include a memory game. I wrote this phrase “ I am going to a picnic, and I am bringing…” I continue the phrase by saying apples. Students were supposed to say the phrase including what I say and add another item. This process was done with the majority of the students. Students liked the activity, and I enjoyed myself too because I could remember some of the names of the people there.

Later, as I was assigned, I worked in some exercises from the book in which they were asked to see the different collocations the word “mind” has, meanings, etc. I couldn’t develop the same exercises in a different way because most of them don’t have or bring the books to the class; ( I notice that in the observation time) for that reason, I kept them working in a “traditional way” , something I didn’t like as I like to do class more dynamic. Despite that feeling, I could see this group was not complicated to work with at all; in fact, they had no problem on working on the book.

Later, I continued with a listening which students had no problems again. Later, I presented a reading which contained the structured they were studying days before, participle clauses. The point for the activity was to identify the participles in the reading, a piece of cake for them. As you may know, when we work with this type of activities, we need a PRE, DURING, and POST time of the activity. Since the reading was related to be broke or running out money, we shared some thoughts related to it, and some funny stories. This made me feel even more comfortable because I realized students were very confident and fearless.

Because of time, I could not finish with the “Post” activity. I planned to have them making a circle with their desks and write a story with the participles of course. To my signal, they were to switch notebooks and continue writing, and so on. At the end, we were to read their master piece.

It is a shame not to have the enough time to develop everything you have planned, but people say that when you have fun time flies.

Hope to do it better next time.