THIRD CLASS (FIRST PERIOD)

HELLO!!

Thanks God I'm done with the teaching practice of this period! Yuju!

I’m not only very happy because I’m done with this period, but also because I did it very well and I also gained new and valuable experiences in regard with the classroom management.

About this experience:
What went well?
Thanks God, almost everything went well since the first activity till the last one.
For the class, I developed a PDP listening about UFOs and aliens, so it was very interesting.

For the pre-activity, I pasted a chart on the board with a few questions which ss discussed in pairs 
and later I checked them by eliciting answers in general.

For the during-activity, I gave ss a multiple choice questionnaire, which only had 5 questions, and I asked them to read it silently so that they get familiarized with it and find the new words; then, I explained the ss the new words and I played the audio three times while they underlined the answers. Finally, I checked the answers orally.

For the post-activity, I put some pieces of color paper (red, purple and yellow) on a desk and I asked ss to picked one of them in order to have the ss performing in pairs different role-plays. Then, I pasted on the board a chart containing three different role-plays, one for each color; thus, the ss who chose the red color would act out a different situation from the other two colors. Take a look to the pic:
ROLE-PLAYS

I gave ss enough time to create their “sketches” as I helped them with their vocabulary.
Finally, just four pairs performed their situation because of the time.

What didn’t go so well?


Thanks God, almost nothing; the only thing that the teacher told me was that I should have the shy students participating inasmuch as in all the activities that implied participation, especially in the role-play, only the extraverted ss participated.  
And I’m totally in agreement with that nevertheless when you are a practitioner you have your time limited to developed different activities; thus, it becomes time-consuming trying to have shy ss participating because you have to tell them a few times and be patient till they decide to do it, in my opinion. 
On the other hand, as a teacher I know that it’s a must; it’s my responsibility to have all my ss working hard and participating equally.  


Ok that's all. hanks for all your previous comments and for the new ones beforehand :D

Second Class (Second Semester, First Period)

HILARIOUS EXPERIENCE!

Konnichiwa my bloggers!

Yesterday I taught my second class with the Intermediate I group and it was a nice class because we all have fun and learn at the same time.

As I told you in my previous entry, most of the students are boys who are so outgoing and who like to joke around, which is good when you need their participation and to have a fun environment in the class. Nevertheless, you have to lead them correctly; you don’t have to be “so tight neither so loose” otherwise they may feel and behave inhibited or they may do a party in the classroom! Thanks God, the teacher told me in the feedback that she liked my classroom management.

I began the class by playing an Bingo of Adjectives…

      

Then, I did a quick grammar review about Adverbs of Manner; I wrote some of the spelling rules to make adverbs of manner from adjectives and I used some of the adjectives of the Bingo as examples.

Next, I asked ss to form two groups to do a competition game for which I gave each group 12 of the Bingo’s flashcards so that they could write the correct adverbs of manner by using the given adjectives. The group with fewer mistakes would win candies…

…I checked each group’s answers on the board so that they could learn from their mistakes and group 2 won the candies!

The next activity was a mimic game in which participants were chosen by playing the hot potato…And here is when the HILARIOUS MOMENT comes…

                   

To begin, the teacher didn’t take the CD player to the class so I asked the students if one of them could sing and one of them agree, so he went to the board and started singing while the rest of the class passed the CANDIES…yes :$ CANDIES…I thought it was going to be a good idea that the object that students will pass were candies…for sure that was a bad idea because they eat them! …

While the game I heard ss laughing, but I thought they were laughing because of their classmate’s voice…I didn’t get angry, I just started laughing and I said: Come on! The people who ate the candies should come to the board to do some mimics. And some of the students stood up and did it.

While the mimics we all continued laughing with these boys…the words they mimicked were adjectives which were used in the final activity, which was a fill in the blanks.

All in all, every group I have taught at the University has been different, but any of those groups have behaved as this group; I hope you don’t misunderstand me because they are participative, friendly and respectful, but if you give them the opportunity to do a prank they will. So Warning with them! Ha-ha

  

First Class (Second Semester)

Hello my blogger’s friends, welcome to my site again!

On Thursday, August 8^th I taught my fist class of this semester and thanks God it was a pretty nice experience; I only got nervous the day before but not the main day neither during the class, I guess the previous experiences helped me to feel more confident and it was also a good day for me.

This period I’m teaching Intermediate II and they are a large group of students; most of them are boys and it seems they like to joke around, but they also like to work in class.

In regard with the lesson, I didn’t spend too much time creating it because I only added a song, “You’re beautiful” by James Blunt, as a warm-up and I took the rest of the activities from the teacher’s lesson; the activities were from the controlled practice and they were nice, easy and quick to develop.

At the beginning of the class, I thought that only a few students were going to be in class because only a few of them were there on time, the rest of them were late.

While I was introducing myself, some of the students were not paying attention to me and they were kind of noisy, that never happened to me before; it wasn’t that bad, but it was rare.

During the development of the first activity a few students were with their cellphones so I asked them to keep them, that either happened to me in the previous classes. Nevertheless, after checking the first activity, I felt they started changing their attitude; they were paying attention to me and to the activities, they behave and were participative. Thus, by the end of the class, I could feel the connection I usually feel with my students; something that can be described as mutual sympathy, and that was nice  :).  

My LAST Class!!!

HELLO and welcome to my blog!!!

OMG this is my final entry of this semester because I’m done with the teaching practices and it feels So great, isn’t it guys?

Thanks to my lovely God, I didn’t get nervous in this class which was amazing because I could enjoy it more and I record it too. However, in comparison with my previous lessons this one was not so good as the other ones because it wasn’t so interactive and dynamic; I had to teach grammar and make sure ss understand the topic with a controlled practice and that reduced the time for me to do more active and fun activities.

Nevertheless, I began the class with TPR; we played a game that many of you may already know it by this moment because some of us have done it in our previous classes, the game is called: “Rabbits to your house, Houses to your rabbit and Earthquake!”. It was kind of difficult to explain so I had to explain it twice, but at the end we all had fun. I took advantage of the activity to elicit some vocabulary about furniture, which was the target vocabulary and “Some and any” the target grammar.

The other game that I could do was “The Chinese Whisper” in which the class was split in two groups and each team did a vertical line in front of the board so that the participant of each group who was in front of the board could write the sentence which was sent it orally and secretly by their group. The sentence was given by me to the last two participants of each group at the same time so that they could say it to the person who was in front of them, and this person could say it to the next person and so on till the message could get to the person who was in front of the board. The team who did it faster and without any grammar or spelling mistakes got a point and the team with more points got the prize!!

Well, that was my class and as I told you what I liked the most was the fact that I didn’t get nervous, and that I could enjoy it more, especially the first and the last activity. It was also nice to see the students’ good attitude in this and in the previous class because in the first one they were like not cooperating, so it makes me think that, in that area, I could do a good job too because I motivated them with my enthusiasm, good attitude and also many gummies! Ha-ha…But it worked!! He-he

To finalized, it comes from my heart this beautiful feeling of thankfulness with God and my family because they helped me to have this opportunity and supported me in the “Ups and Downs”. And I’m also thankful with my co-worker for her support and help as well as with my tutors for their pieces of advice and patient and with you my commenters’ friends who have cheered me up with your positive comments, thanks for your time. God bless you all, love ya. <3

My 2nd Class with the Basic Group!!

Monday, May 6^th 2013

こんにちは！

Thanks God this class was better than the previous one because my students got fun and I could enjoy it too!

Most of the things went well; it helped me a lot the fact that I just had to develop activities during the class, which means no grammar. In addition, I put into practice all the pieces of advice that the teacher gave me the last time, which were more related with the kind of activities; he asked me to include more TPR and more speaking activities and that was what I did.

I prepared three competition games with the aim of motivating students to participate; in each game, each group got points, but the group with more points at the end of the class got “the gummies”. The first game was called “Listen to and go to get it!”; for this one, I pasted 18 irregular verbs around the classroom so that one participant peer each group could go to get the verb, which I have mentioned in present tense, and paste it on the board. 

My second activity and game was a Bingo of adjectives, in which winning depended on luck. Taking advantage of the Bingo’s vocabulary, I focused students on the adjectives of appearance and their opposites, and I also provided them a copy with extra vocabulary that had some pictures. Then, I took advantage of the flashcards that I used in my previous class, flashcards of dead famous people, to describe them using sentences in past tense. It was great to see my students participating this time!

Next...


I asked students to make groups of four in order to describe a picture of a dead famous person, this time the flashcards were not the same. Each group wrote 5 sentences and they chose a member of their team to read them aloud.

Finally, we enjoyed the last game, it was a writing game; I pasted a picture of Selena for one team and a picture of Princess Diana for the other team so that each team could write as many sentences as they could in three minutes. The students’ adrenaline was high at that moment, and each group just wanted to win so the girls who had more fluent ideas took the control of the marker and they wrote most of the sentences! It was difficult for me to control that because they were so excited, they just wanted to win, I mean, it was fun, but I didn’t expect that. So, next time, I’ll try to give each student some pieces of color paper which serve as a participation ticket to make sure everyone participate and to avoid having the same students participating J

Well, this was my class and I feel very satisfy of having reached my goal which was: Have fun and learn at the same time, which is great!

私のブログを読んでくれてありがとう。^J^

(Thank you for reading my blog)

1st Class at Basic English (3rd Period)

Monday, April 29th 2013

Salutations everyone!!

Hope you being doing great.

This period I am teaching Basic with a totally different group of students from the ones that I had taught before inasmuch as this group doesn’t like to participate in the speaking activities; I guess, it is because they are still in a receptive stage in which the listening and the reading activities are easier for them in comparison with the activities that require production such as: the speaking and the writing activities. In addition, there’s something particular about this group; most of these students have failed at least once and actually most of them are about to fail, so this contributes to have a demotivating environment, increasing the lack of confidence in the students by the time of speaking or writing on the board. But thanks God, I have noticed that they definitely enjoy playing games that involve TPR as well as music, so I’ll try to go for that way in my next class.

About my class:

In my opinion, I planned a nice lesson. I used flashcards of dead famous people to have students talking about the past as a warm-up. Next, I split the class in two and had both groups collecting the verbs mentioned in a song (Don’t you worry child – by Swedish House Mafia) 

Then, I explained the grammar with the help of a video which provided many examples and one practice that I developed in general. Next, I gave each student a copy with some exercises to solve: a short reading with some blanks that they had to fill in, some comprehension questions, sentences which they had write in negative, and some unscramble questions. I provided instructions and examples for each exercise as well as I checked them orally. Finally, I did a speaking activity with the unscrambled questions in which ss stood up and interviewed a classmate for one minute. After that minute, they changed roles; they did it three times and my time there was over, so I couldn’t do the last activity which was a TPR game.

All in all, I liked my class despite of the mishaps I had with the projector, the students’ attitude by the time of speaking, and my nerves because I got nervous like in my first :S Anyways, I’m happy and satisfy of having this experience which will help me to better. Learning and Improvement is my goal in my professional life ;) J

Third class in Intermediate II (Second Period)

                                                                                                    Thursday, April 4th 2013

Greetings!!

Thanks God, my third experience with this group of students was very good and I enjoyed it.

What went well?

Most of the activities turned out the way I expected and students were very participative this time. Among the activities that the teacher liked the most were: The warm-up because I started the class by activating schema/prior knowledge, the presentation because I used a song in which ss had to paste the most relevant lyrics for the topic, which was about “Countable and uncountable food”, and finally, the teacher liked the fact that I used a PowerPoint presentation to explain the grammar.
In the next link is the PowerPoint presentation, in case you want to check it.

https://powerpoint.office.live.com/p/PowerPointView.aspx?FBsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fdownload%2Ffile_preview.php%3Fid%3D505139276218351%26time%3D1365610861%26metadata&access_token=100000164512276%3AAVKtfnPpAa1HWcB-2QMQyatydidFJHoBpJormyQZQmqtfw&title=COUNTABLE+AND+UNCOUNTABLE+NOUN_+presentation.pptx

What didn’t go so well?

Well, I had troubles with the equipment; the projector wasn’t able to show the presentation that I had in my computer so I had to use the teacher’s computer. Nevertheless, once we could see the PowerPoint presentation everything was good and actually helped me to save time since I didn’t have to write too much on the board or spend time pasting charts.

At the end of the class I thanked the students for their participation inasmuch as I wasn’t expecting their good behavior, I didn’t tell them that, but I did thank them for their behavior since the first class and they applauded me, so I felt very happy because I know they did it with their heart :3

All in all, I’m really thankful for all the experience that I have gained during my teaching practicum till now because I have learned many good things from all people around me; I have learned from their good attitudes, how to present the activities better, how to manage the class better, and many other things that helped me to be better not only as a professional, but also as a person.