Reivindication

As I mentioned in my last post, my previous class was not so good; actually, it sucked. Anyway, today I had the opportunity to do things better. The teacher told me that I had to make a review of the previous classes, so I started my lesson with a nice warm up. I had the students make three teams. I gave a set of words and they had to work as a team to order those words and form coherent sentences using the pattern verb + infinitive and verb + gerund. They had 2 minutes to write as many correct sentences as they could; then, they had to move to another desk and start working on another set of stripes; at the end, the team with more points (correct sentences) was the winner. The warm up took more than 10 minutes but the teacher liked it because the students were not only playing; they were learning something related to the previous class, also.

After that, it was time to check the homework. In the previous class the teacher had assigned them to complete two paragraphs with the correct form of the verbs. to check that homework in a different way, I gave a sheet of paper with one verb to each student (the verbs were written in the infinitive and in the gerund form); as they read the paragraph, they had to raise the papers with the correct answers. To check the second paragraph, I gave a soft ball to one of the students; he started to read, and when he got to the blank where they had to write the correct answer, he had to throw the ball to another student; that student had to tell the correct the answer and then continue with the reading. The activity was very nice because they had to read aloud and to pay attention, if not, they were in danger of receive a ball on their faces. After reading the paragraphs I made them repeat the words they had mispronounced. Later on, we worked on a practice in which they had to write the correct form of the verb in some sentences -a piece of cake for them, and for me- I feel I did it better this time. The teacher congratulated me at the end, and I improved my grade which was the best part.