Game Over =)

Hello everybody! I am glad to tell you that I have already finished my second teaching mission. I feel released for I will have a week off.

Well to tell you the truth, I don´t feel so satisfied with my performance on this period. I think I could have done a better job; however, the group of students I had was kind of large and it was a little bit difficult to manage.   I hope my last teaching mission could be better.

For today´s class, I was assigned to work on the practice phase of the "future progressive and future perfect" tenses. I have already said that I hate to work on that part as some of you hate teaching grammar. Anyways, it is part of the process so I have to do it.

I began the class with a nice warm-up (kill your classmate) in which students had to make two teams and each member of the teams had to compete against a member of the opposite team. I wrote the name of the game on the board, and they got excited just by reading  it. They were asking what they were going to do. I asked them to make to lines in front of a desk in which I had placed a toy gun. When they saw the gun, they got even more excited. 

I had to call out any verb in its base form and students had to give me the participle form (which was required for them to practice the use of future perfect tense). The first student on giving me the right participle form for the verb could pick up the gun and kill his/her classmate.

After that,  I continue with a reading which contained many sentences on the target structures. To introduce the reading we discussed a question related to the topic of the passage. Then, I pat many words which I had written on different colorful papers on some desks.  While I was reading the passage, students had to pay attention for them to be able to pick up the words I mention. If a student picked up a word which did not belong to the passage, he had to get a penalty. 

Then, students underlined the sentences on the target structures, and we read them together. They also worked on some collocations related to the passage. 

Finally, they work on an exercise in which they had to write sentences according to the prompts that I provided. I pasted some flashcards of different professionals  on the board, and also different times on colorful pieces of paper for each flashcard. Based on that, they had to write what that people will be doing by that time next week. My time was over so I could not checked that exercise. 

 Well guys, that´s all what I can tell you. I hope you have a nice day...

Frustrated :(

Hi everyone!!!

I am so disappointed of my performance in today's class. I was assigned to work on the book which is something I really hate since I have to follow step by step what is there; and I prefer to use my own activities and adapt them according to my students and also to what I have to teach.

Since the moment that my tutor told me that I was going to work on the book, I imagined that it was not going to be such a great experience. Even though, I try to prepare myself and also enough material to get students interest, I felt worried because I have to work with lots of vocabulary that was new not only for the students, but also for me.

Well, I arrived one hour before the class so I could have everything ready when students arrive. I also needed some minutes to look for the meaning of some new words that were a little bit difficult for me.

I began my class with a warm-up in which students had to work in two different teams. I gave them an envelope with the target vocabulary. I had to call out a word which they had to look for. Then, a member of the team had to run to the board and paste the word on it. The first person on pasting the word had a chance to spell it correctly and if so, they gave a point to their teams. Everybody liked the game. They were very excited, and even my tutor told me that it was a nice way to introduce new vocabulary.

After that, I had to continue with a reading (here comes the awful part). My tutor asked me to cover three pages from the book, and there were two readings, a listening and some vocabulary practice. There were too much things to cover that I was afraid of not being able to finish so I try to hurry up. The problem was that my tutor wanted me to spend more time on the first reading and I did the opposite since I wanted to cover more from the book. At the end, my tutor told me that it seemed like if I were not prepared enough for the reading which is something true.

My feedback was good since my tutor is pretty nice on doing so, but my grade was low. I hope I could improve next week.

On the middle!!!

Hello guys!!!

Today, I felt kind of nervous since I was going to be observed not only by my tutor, but also by one of my classmates. I do not know why I felt in such a way since when I teach I have many students in front of me. It might be because when we see people taking notes about our performance, we tend to think that they are writing something we did wrong. Thanks God as the class was going on, my nervousness started to disappear.

For today’s class, I was assigned to begin a new topic which is something I really love since I have the chance to explain the grammar part (in this case: first and second type conditionals). Yesterday, I looked for activities on the internet, and I found a nice reading with many target structures for students to underline. I decided to use it on the practice phase.

Today, I arrived very early to the university since I had to observe a classmate’s class. After that, I had some minutes to prepare all the material I was going to use for my class. I arranged the seats on a semicircle since that’s the only way in which I could monitor all of the students. I pasted the class' objective on the board, and .some other material.

Well, I began with a very common warm-up (the hot potato); however, I made some changes. Before giving the directions for the game, I asked students to read a quotation which was on the board (“If you do it well, I will give you a candy”) they had to report that sentence which was the topic on last week. They did it very well. The purpose was to review the previous class (reported speech), and also to introduce the new one since the quotation was a conditional.  In a general way, I explained what a condition was. Then, I made students to stand up and make a circle. I gave a ball (a blue and a green ball) to two of the students which they had to pass on opposite sides while some music was playing. The students who got the green ball had to pick up a paper which contained a funny condition (e.g. If you don’t go to the bathroom, If you eat a frog, If you kiss my sister, etc), and the other student had to provide a complement to the conditions.  The activity was appropriate to the topic, but the important thing was that students enjoyed it as they were practicing the target structures without noticing it. After the warm up I gave a candy to the students since it was the result of the condition which they had fulfilled (“If you do it well, I will give you a candy”).

After that, I continue with the grammar explanation. I wrote some rules and their respective examples of first conditional on the board, and I also dictated some others to the students. Then, we had an oral practice for which I used the conditions from the warm-up. I read the condition, and students participated by giving some options to complete the sentences. Then, I dictated them for them to write their own ideas on how to complete the conditions.

Then, I continued explaining the second type conditional. After that, I asked students to work in pairs. I gave a reading to each pair for them to read it and identify all the first and second conditionals on it. Unfortunately, my time was up, so my tutor checked the answers on the passage.

My feedback as it was expected was great. I had some pronunciation mistakes, and even though I felt kind of nervous, I got an acceptable grade.