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.