Free Practice

Today's class was my opportunity to correct the mistakes I made the last time. I went early to the classroom and I arranged the desks in four groups because the warm up I had prepared was for working in groups. I started the class with the warm up. The students work in groups of seven ( the class is too large, that is 28 students); they had to re-arrange some strips in order to form coherent sentences using the simple past tense; they had 2 minutes to do so, and after those two minutes they had to change places with the next group in order to work on their strips. At the end, the group with more correct sentences was the winner. My tutor liked this warm up, but the only thing was that it took more than 10 minutes. I consider that there shouldn't be such a strict rule for warm ups; I consider that if students are learning and enjoying a warm up, the activity may continue without falling into the comission of a "sin". Well, maybe I'm mistaken, but that's what I think. After the warm up I continued with the free practice; students worked in the same groups, they had to write a short composition about Charly (an imaginary guy) describing the activities he did last week. They started to write, but the interesting thing of this activity was that they had to pass to the front to read the compostion and also to mimic the actions they wrote. It was funny because they wrote some funny, embarrasing, and strange things that happened to Charly, so they had to mimic everything. To finish my class, I made them work in pairs. They wrote 10 statements about what they did last week (5 were true and 5 were false) and their classmate had to guess which ones were true and wich ones were false. They liked the activity and they use the target structure to perform it. This was my today's experience. I enjoyed it.

A disaster

Today was not a good day in my practice. Where can I start from? Well, I prepare a good warm up and an excellent presentation; grammar? it was so so. 

I arrived early to the classroom and prepared some material I was going to use in the class. This time, I arranged the desks in a semi circle. I started with the warm up. Students made three lines and I explained the activity. They had to "write" a verb on the back of their classmates, and the person at the front of the line had to write the verb on the board in order to get a point for his/her team. To tell the truth, the activity sucked. Some of the students made a lot of noise and were tricky.

The presentation was the only thing that was nice. I use a reading that was in the student's book. I read the text the first time; the second time the students read along with me and after that I made two teams and asked for 4 representatives from each group. I pasted some strips on the board; such strips had verbs in the simple past tense that appeared in the text. I read the text again and the representatives from the groups had to pick up the words from the board. My tutor liked this activity a lot because it is a good way to have a reading practice.

The worst part of this session of practice was the grammar part. I started teaching about the simple past tense, but my ideas got mixed in my head and I taught (well I tried to teach) a lot of things at the same time; I started with the past form of the regular verbs, continued with the past form of the verb Be, and finished talking about voiced and voiceless sounds at the end of the verbs. It was a disaster! I continue stating that I do like teaching grammar, but this time I don't know what happened. I think I got nervous because of a strange and unknown reason that I am still wondering how could be possible. I guess I don't even have an eight as a grade; maybe I got a seven, a sad seven.

Conclusion... I do have to do it better next time because this time I sucked. That's what I learned.

The second chance

I had my second chance today. Early in the morning, I prepared my class. The topic was "Adjectives of Frequency". The lesson plan was well elaborated; I liked the activities it proposed. I looked for a different warm up and I performed one in which students have to make two teams; they send a representative to the front and mimic the content of the flashcard I show to them so that the representative guesses. The group liked that activity; well, they always like to have "mini competitions" in the class. For the presentation, I had the students  read two shorts paragraphs in the student's book and then answer the questions about those paragraphs. At the end, that activity was not so good because the teacher told me that I could have improved it by adding more to it. I could have read the paragraphs along with the students or I could have made something more creative. I learn a good lesson. After that, I taught the grammar related to the use of adverbs of frequency. I like grammar, so that was a piece of cake; that group learns really fast. They learned the rules quickly. For practice, I made them convert some sentences into their own information by using adverbs of frequency. The activity was nice and I finished my turn on time. After my class, the teacher gave me feedback and I learned a couple of things that I hope to improve for the next class. First, I learned that any activity or game has to be as more well explained as possible, and I need to include a clear example so that students do not get confused. Second, simple readings can be funny if I use my creativity and add extra things that will become them more interesting.
I consider that today I got a very nice experience because I could receive more tips to improve my teaching. 

Ways to use weblogs in education.

Technology is part of our lives. We use a lot of different tools that help us to improve our abilities. The use of technology in education is an excellent way for teachers to keep themselves up to date. 

Blogging has a lot of advantages, and the uses of this online tool are awesome. 

You might like to create a reflective, journal type blog to:

• reflect on your teaching experiences.  

• describe what worked for you in the classroom or what didn’t work. 

• write about something you learned from another teacher.

• share ideas for teaching activities or language games to use in the classroom. 

• explore important teaching and learning issues.

 What can I post in my blog??

• post class-related information such as calendars, events, homework assignments and other pertinent class information.
• post assignments based on literature readings and have students respond on their own weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work.
• communicate with parents if you are teaching elementary school students.
• post prompts for writing.
• provide examples of classwork, vocabulary activities, or grammar games.
• provide online readings for your students to read and react to.
• gather and organize Internet resources for a specific course, providing links to appropriate sites and annotating the links as to what is relevant about them.
• post photos and comment on class activities.
• invite student comments or postings on issues in order to give them a writing voice.
• publish examples of good student writing done in class.
• show case student art, poetry, and creative stories.

 

You can encourage your students to blog:

• their reactions to thought-provoking questions.
• their reactions to photos you post.
• journal entries.
• results of surveys they carry out as part of a class unit.
• their ideas and opinions about topics discussed in class.
   

I'm back!

Today  I started the second period practicum. Honestly I felt kind of nervous. I received the lesson plan on time, so I read it. First, I  have to mention that the activities in that lesson plan are nice. I prepared some material and I got ready to teach. The class started at 11:00 am. I arrived early (as always jejejeje). Some students were very early in the classroom waiting for the class to start. My tutor teacher arrived there and I started my class. The group is kind of large; they are around 28 students. I was afraid because it is difficult to work with large groups. I started my class with the warm up proposed in the lesson plan,. I was glad since the students were eager to participate; they liked the activity. My nervousness started to dwindle; I felt more comfortable in the classroom. I taught the grammar part and I got surprised because all of them understood quickly; it seemed as if they had a background knowledge about what I was teaching. We practice a little bit the use of the simple present tense to talk about daily routines; they participated a lot. I like this new group I have at this moment. I consider that I will have good times with them. I hope so.