Day 19: The last day

Today it was my last day at the school. I went to the English classroom with the Fifth and sixth grade teacher as usual.  In the classroom, the students worked in an activity from the text book in which each student was given the same chart but with different pictures on them. These were design top work speaking in a way that student A had to ask some questions to student B, in order to find out what the main character was going to do on the days which were not shown on their own one, by using the structure: “to be going to + verb”.

I spent the classroom helping some students with their doubts, and correcting some others when needed, or encouraging them to participate when needed. When they finished, I asked them to ask questions to their partners about their future plans by using the same sentence formation and structure, and that is what they did. At the end of the class, the teacher showed the students a video about a boy who was able to speak eleven different languages, and asked the students some comprehension questions about it.

She took the opportunity to tell some British cultural aspects and also some world politic geography, which would provide the students with some extra overall knowledge about the world. There is not much to say about the two following sessions, as were almost equal to the first one. Having to teach different groups, the teacher repeated the session and I repeated my actions.

After the break I went to a different class with the third and fourth grade teacher, because on the timetable I was given said so, meaning the only difference was that instead of doing the last lessons in the afternoon, these would be held instead of the last morning hour, finishing half an hour later. I was asked to help a student with difficulties finish the book. It did not matter the king of exercises he had to do, as with or without cassette I helped him do all of the exercises, doing the speaking by myself. In this case, it was all vocabulary I knew the pronunciation of very well, having not to fear giving him wrong input at all. After the end of the lesson –which by the way was shorter than the usual morning ones-, he had finished 5 pages from the book.

After that happened I went to the Standard English classroom, and the fifth and sixth grade teacher did the same session with another group.  There I told the students that today it was my last day at the school, and after some greetings I thanked the teacher for all I had learnt at the school center, wished her good summer holidays and said good-bye to the staff at the school center.

I still cannot believe I have finished my stay. I will miss both the students and the teachers here badly, but I will keep with myself everything I have learnt from them, as if in a way a piece of each one’s regards and experience was always with me. I do not regret having come to this school at all, being able to apply all I have learnt here to my lessons as a future English teacher.

Day 18: The fourth session

Today I have been to the tutorial room with the teacher and showed her my last session. She said I would be doing it today, in the second hour. Despite thinking the writing activity was really challenging she allowed me to do it in order to see how I managed to develop it.

In the second hour, I went to the fifth grade classroom with the English teacher, and I began my session by telling the students I had seen they had been working with songs about Tintin in the music festival and on different activities at the school. Then I asked them if they had read some comic books, and which ones. They named many of them and I told them that, as they had been working with verbs in past, today we would read a story about Tintin. I told them that the story hypothetically happened some years ago, and asked them which verb tenses we would use to describe it. They answered that past verb tenses.

Then I told the students there were two different types of past verbs, and asked them which ones I was talking about. Some students raised their hands and answered those regular and irregular verbs. I drew a chart at the blackboard with two columns; one for each category, and asked the students for some examples and also the differences between the first and the second verb types. Then, I said now we knew how to write verbs in past –the students had also worked verbs in the past through my previous sessions as well-, we would be reading the cartoon story.

I asked the students to read the brief explanation below each cartoon I had prepared, by filling the gaps with the different verbs in their past forms. Some of the verbs were already known by the children but others not. I told them nothing was wrong if they did not know some of them, because it was not an exam but an opportunity to learn some of them. I told the students to write down those verbs which came up and were not known by them on the blackboard, as the students read the different cartoons. During the intervention, I made sure all the students followed, and in many occasions I made gestures or simulated situations in order to convey meanings, which worked very well. After some cartoons, I made oral comprehension questions about them, asking for example why they thought Captain Haddock did not want to go with Tintin at the beginning or if Tintin thought his friend was still alive when he wanted to rescue him. As the students read, I helped them with pronunciation and some verb tenses, written down at the blackboard the ones they did not know already.

When we finished reading, I told the students I would give them a worksheet with some cartoons. I told them it was a summary, so they would not find all of them on the worksheet. Then, I told them they would have to order the events in the story, and then try to explain what happened to Tintín on each one, by using their own words or the verbs and expressions they had in the chart. The ones the students showed more difficulties with were the combinations of past and infinitive verb combinations, but I managed to tell them their meaning by asking them to tell me what a combination I wrote meant in Catalan. Once the students had finished numbering the cartoons, we made a global correction, and I asked each student to explain what was happening in the first, second, third and so on and to show which one it was to their partners. After that, I told them to begin with the writing of the story.

As the students were writing, I was moving from table to table solving their doubts and helping them with some verbs. The lesson was said to be super challenging by the English teacher, but despite the differences between students, I managed to teach everything. The students showed motivation and tried to write the story again, performing the quite well with my help. At the end of the session most of the students had finished, and some had not, so I asked the teacher to give them the worksheet as homework or to finish correcting it in another English lesson. The lesson was perfect today. The students were challenged and I almost did not need to call any students’ attention due to disruptive behavior. I only advised one child not to make unnecessary noises with the pencils so that we could hear his partner who was speaking and that was all. The students learnt, were motivated and rose to the challenge of reporting a story in the past.

After finishing my lesson, I went to the P5 patio at the roof of the building and stayed looking after the children. Some of them knew me already from the English sessions, and I asked them about the games they played and so on. One who had problems with a partners had solved them and befriended him. A child showed me a quite original toy consisting on some paper strips which could be moved with some plastic mechanism, forming different shapes. I found my English teacher at the roof, and I explained her I usually came to the playground in the roof when she was out, instead of the one below, and I stayed there in order to learn more about the children.

After that, I went back to the class and helped the teacher hang science project pictures on the wall and another teacher unhang different ones at the moment. From her I learnt that the students would be developing some activities next week, in a trip where some monitors arrange activities and games for them to play and different schools met and attended the event. Back in class, the children were told to create their own story out of a chart with different actions and possibilities to choose from, in order to create a simple story in the past. Today, I participated a lot in the lesson, solving the students’ doubts and answering their questions about the exercise, at the time I encouraged them to work. Both groups developed their own activities, and I even took the chance to encourage a student to write his own book (later on) now he knew how to write past tenses, telling him maybe he became a millionaire with the book sells and was able to buy a million play stations, in regards to his answer of preferring to play computer games instead, and the fact they had played who wants to be a millionaire in my previous session.

Today I have told some of the staff it was the day before my last day at the school. I have learnt a lot of things here and I do not regret having chosen the school at all. The teachers were truly competent and I have had the chance to learn a lot from them. I will miss the teachers and students both.

Day 17: Back on 5th and 6th grade.

Today I have gone with the English teacher to the reading session, as usual. She had come from the trip, together with the sixth day students, all of who had behaved very well. Despite having some issues at the beginning of the school trip like becoming dizzy due to bus sickness, the student had a lot of fun during their stay in Switzerland.

In the first classroom, we have corrected the extra work sheets I had prepared for the London session, all of which the teacher gave the students to finish as homework for today. Some students did not do them, but most did, and we all made the global correction. Then, the students were told to do some exercises about that they had done over the last weekend. I move through the table and helped the students with some doubts, although most 5^th grade students did not have doubts nor questions about it, so the session ran smoothly. When most of the students finished the exercises, the teacher would ask some students to approach the digital blackboard in order to proceed with the global correction of the exercises. At the end of the class, the students sang “Yellow Lemon Tree song” in a karaoke version.

In the next classroom I was told today the students would be taking four lessons in the morning and no sessions in the afternoon, due to the recent schedule spring/summer timetable modifications. Now, the students were shown the other classroom’s drawings about science, as well and their own ones, together with some comments on which ones were the best, and which ones needed some more work. The teacher showed the students the different drawings for the students to see, explaining her opinion on them. After that, students were asked about the vocabulary on all flashcards from the science project, and then about the objects they still did not know.

In the next session after the break, the teacher drew a chart in which different materials and actions we could apply to them related to their properties, and gave the students more detailed explanations about each action’s meaning.  Once they knew, the students were asked to complete with ticks and crosses the relationship between objects and applicable actions through the chart. The students were excited because nurses had come to the school today in order to give them vaccines. They were called in groups of four and once they were done, they were replaced by different ones. At the end of the lessons, the students were shown a song by Simple Plan. The last session was quite similar to this one, repeating the exercises with another group.

Day 16: The sixth grade students’ return from the trip

Today I have attended the first-and-second grade teacher’s reading lesson, previous to the English lessons. The students have been following the reading of the same book aloud, as usual, following a whole group approach. This allows all the students to follow, as the second grade students become more easily distracted, and by asking them randomly to continue, the teacher makes sure all of them are following.

In the first lesson, the students were quite excited, probably because some of their elder brothers and sisters were coming back from their travel to Sweden. Some of them began showing minor disruptive behavior, and at first I allowed them that. However, the teacher asked me to control them, and became more lenient probably to see what I was going to do about it. Later on, the teacher left the room and asked me to guide the students in the watch of a video. However, by that time things had gone worse, having already seen highly disrespectful behaviors in a student towards the lesson.

None of it I was going to allow, both because it was affecting the proper classroom climate for learning and my teaching skills, so I decided to give the student a call of attention, saying very seriously she complained about not knowing English but was not doing anything to change that. I added I did not find it was not fun at all. And that was enough to reestablish the order in the whole class. Then, I displayed the video on the book, and asked the students if they were wearing these kinds of clothes. They said no, and I told them it was because the video was about a clothes museum, and that people used to dress like the ones many years ago. There was a deep silence and all the students were looking at the video when the teacher came back to the class.

In the next lesson, the third-and-four grade teacher asked the students to do some exercises using their text books, and it was quite successful. The teacher showed the students the drawings, pictures and corrections on the digital blackboard, asked the students to do the exercises in their own by writing on the books and then she would ask some volunteers to correct. In the meantime, she was making sure all the students were working, moving from table to table. Then, global corrections followed, where a student had to click at the digital blackboard to show the answers once volunteers had expressed their ideas aloud. The third grade text book begins to be enough cognitively demanding, so the activity worked well.

At the end of the class the clock was setting ahead of time, and when the teacher realized, all the students were ready to go to the playground. Instead, she asked them to show me a song they had been working with. Before that, they had sang the “super sister” song, a quite original, funny and nice song which had been a success at the school festival.

After the break, I went with the third-and-four grade teacher to the second group class, as she was substituting for another teacher as well. There, the students were asked about the seal body parts due to a third grade science CLIL they were working with, and then requested to glue the different words of its body parts into the drawings, where each one belonged. When they finished, they were asked to sing some songs and watch some videos. Here was the child with difficulties I had mentioned yesterday. However, knowing him more it was way easier to help him, and more gratifying to see how he was learning. During the session, I was moving around the tables, helping the children as much as I could. I was participating quite much today, and I am happy about it.

In the afternoon, the third-and-four grade teacher told me to help the students with their science exam and project. While she was coming I was asked to help unhanging some butterfly drawings about the album cover of second grade students. When I finished, she arrived. Here the exams were not filling the gaps ones, but different ones, resembling the Standard English ones focused on level with some Science contents as well. I helped the students with the exam and told them what to do next. For the science project, they had to find ideas for keeping the environment and make some drawings with text, from the ones given at the book. After that, they had to classify the different animals in the rainforest into the specific groups: mammals, birds….and do on. I helped many students here too, and the last session was a repetition of this one, this time with the other four grade group.

Day 15: Aiding diversity

Today I have been asked by the third-and-fourth-grade teacher to help her attend one child with difficulties in the third grade classroom. He showed an unusual behavior, becoming unable to grab the pencil correctly, extremely excited at being asked to write or to face complex tasks, with big difficulties to focus or stay still and calm, and sometimes showing sudden aggressive behavior towards the other classmates.

The teacher asked a child how was she feeling today, and she acted out the way the child felt for all the students to see. Then, the teacher asked the other students how they felt, and the children with difficulties I was with said he was angry. The teacher said that was very good, and drew an angry face at the blackboard. She asked me how I was feeling and I added an extra adjective to the list, mimicking the action by myself.

Then, the teacher asked the students to draw six different faces with the sentences below them, and I divided the students’ attention from the color tray towards the teacher’s explanations, in a positive way. After that, the student threw the colored pencil remnants over the table all of a sudden, and I calmed him down. I asked him to pick up the rubbish and throw it into the box, by showing everything I was doing to him and changing the intonation. He performed the task quickly, but when his partner took the box away from him he hit him in a violent way. Then I briefly told him off, and changed his attention towards the task.

I pointed at the different faces on the blackboard and asked him what that was. As he answered, I gave him the tray again in order to make the different drawings and told him how to draw the different faces. He showed good predisposition towards the task, which I supported with positive reinforcement and oral interaction. The biggest issue was when he was asked to write the sentence in English under the images. I managed to make him do the first one, but the task made him utterly nervous, so I told the teacher and she told me she would try to make him continue. After a few unsuccessful tries, she gave him a different task which he could perform; also cognitively rich but which did not require as much coordination.

In the meantime I helped another child do the letters smaller, by making him repeat the last words he had written in a more suitable handwriting. I also showed through mimic a girl what was what in her confusion between hunger and thirst. The first one managed to considerably improve his performance during the lesson. I also made him talk by asking him questions about what he had drawn or written.

When the bell rang, I went to the small patio in the roof, where the playground for the youngest children was located on. There, I talked to some children and the teachers as well. I learnt the first group was quite difficult to manage and that half of the children’s parents were divorced. I talked about many things about the children and the school and helped some children who were verbally fighting each other.

I asked them what happened and told them if they disagreed on something; they had to talk to each other in order to try to solve the problem rather than fighting. I told them we adults at the school sometimes disagree on something and we discuss in order to find for the best solution or one which suited us both. Obviously I did not use these words but simpler ones, and the child understood, apologized to his partner and went back to play again. I also spoke to some children who asked me about my name and the subject I taught and joked with some others.

Back in class, this time I was with the first-and-second grade teacher teaching second. I was asked to make some children a re-exam in which they had the opportunity to repeat the parts they wanted to improve from the last one they did. I took them to another room and told them to place the rubber in the middle of the table for the ones to be able to use it as well, and that if they talked I would pick up the exam back and they would lose the opportunity to have a higher mark. It worked and the students showed a good behavior and finished the exam correction early. As they finished, I sent them back to class.

 In the afternoon, the same teacher as the last class one made a standard lesson with different listening activities and a speaking one about clothes where I showed them what as I wearing. The classroom went well, because the activities were appropriate, meaningful and cognitive-demanding for the children to work with. In the last hour, however, we had the first group, and it was more difficult to manage, as the teachers had said before. The text books in this case, however, had too easy tasks for the children to perform, mostly about repeating words, matching them to their drawings and coloring or gluing stickers.  I think the teacher is aware of that too, because sometimes she complements the book activities with extra ones she prepares, more meaningful and cognitively demanding, in order to prevent the children from becoming bored due to the easy and repetitive manner of the text book ones.

Day 14: While the 6th grade students are travelling abroad…

Today I have gone to the reading session with the First and Second grade English teacher.  I have introduced myself to the students in the class and made sure they were reading the book aloud. These students had no different books to choose from but a single one they were reading in a whole-group approach. This variation was because the student had some pupils with special needs and working with the same book she made sure all the students were following.

In the first hour, I went to 1^st B class, and the 1^st and Second grade teacher introduced me to the students and asked me to help a student with Asperger Syndrome do the exam. I went to a separate room - next to the teachers’ one- with another practical teacher and we helped the student with the exam. He had some difficulties in spelling, but the most difficult thing for him was to understand what he had to do on each exercise. The children had a good memory, and we helped them out in telling him what to do and focus on the task to perform. At the end, he finished the same exam as his peers in time, finishing all of the exercises with most of the answers right.

In the next hour, I went to Third Grade with the Third and fourth grade English teacher. There, she told me to help another student with special needs do the exam his class had to sit on that time. The difficulties this student had were related to how to do the different exercises, and somehow to reading comprehension ones. I followed the teachers’ advice of using colors to find the answers on the readings, and helped her with the rest of the exercises as well, following my tips, indications and advices. I made sure the student would have time to finish the exam, and that she was not given any answer but given learning strategies instead.

I told her to check for word spelling on different exercises in the same work sheet, to highlight important words and to work systematically focusing on a single task, not to waste time looking at the rest until the first one is finished, unless she did not know the answer for the first one. Of course I taught her that through simple indications she could understand, by using the English language all of the time.

After the break I was asked by the third and fourth grade teacher to do an oral exam for the students to sit on. I called them one by one, asking them questions in English. If they answered the whole answer correctly I had to write down a tick, if they missed some words or pronounced it incorrectly different ones, and so on. The exam worked well and the students were usually well prepared. In the afternoon after lunch, I did the same test, taking back students in order. It was interesting to see how many questions in English they were able to answer.

Day 12: Playing with flashcards.

Today, I have attended the reading session as usual, in which the students had to read some books. One student asked me for the Tintin comic he was reading, and I said the other teacher had borrowed for a Tintín project, so he picked up another one. I corrected the students who were asked to read some fragment of their borrowed book when needed and talked a little bit about their reading interests.

When we came back class the English teacher told me today the students would play an interesting card game, in which they would have to speak in pairs. First, the teacher gave the students a photocopy with some questions which were missing words. These were all questions in present about knowing each other, in order to get information from different people. These included both questions with numeric answers, such as number of family members, age, weight and size, and some other non-numeric ones as well, about hobbies, interests and names.

When most of the students had finished filling in the gaps in order to complete the questions, the teacher made a global correction in a power point presentation, in which each click meant displaying another answer. Some questions were in red color, while other ones were in black. Then, the teacher told the students today we would play “big town game”, having brand new flashcards. She explained the game rules, by telling the students they would have different flashcards with data about a character, and they would have to talk to a classmate. Then, they would have to ask him/her non-numeric questions, and the other person had to answer: “and you?” in order to find out things about each other. Each one replied according to the information they had in their flashcards. After having made 5 questions, then they had to play scissors, rock and stone, and the winner had to ask a red question, meaning one with a numeric answer. The one with the highest quantity or number was the winner, and took the card from his/her classmate.

The teacher made an example so as to illustrate how the game worked, by asking a student what to do. When all the students had learnt the game mechanics, she gave each one a set of 5 flashcards and the game began. I was moving along the class with the students, checking they talked in English and formulated the correct questions and answers. The game was fun and successful, and in one time I was given a flashcard by a student who did not have a partner for me to play with. At the end of the session, one student asked the teacher to display a video on YouTube, and she agreed. I was surprised to see that the video was actually appropriate for the lesson, as it was in English, had comprehensible age and stage appropriate English level for the students and was fun.

In the video: “Mario the cook”, a Mario puppet was cooking a recipe, explaining the ingredients, while funny things happened. The characters talked in English, so the children had a positive input in the language and the video was really fun. When it finished, we saw another video with the same character trying to cook a fish, but the fish nearly cooked him instead. It was really funny as well. Tomorrow the students are travelling to France and then Sweden, so today the teacher wanted to make something especially fun but didactic at the same time and she managed to do it perfectly. Today it was raining, so the students stayed in the classroom playing board games, and I stayed talking with them and making sure they behaved well.

In the afternoon, I was asked to repeat the session of the contest about London, the “Who wants to be a millionaire” power point presentation because the teacher normally did the same with both groups. This time, though, I had changed the money mechanics, so that the students could either win or lose money according to the wrong or correct answers they gave. This way, the students did not stop focusing on giving the right answer towards the end, and practiced sums in English through the money calculations.

Day 11: Session # 3

Today, I have gone to the reading corner, and some comprehension questions were made about a written text. It talked about how some Native American languages are now disappearing. The students went to the class and the teacher asked them some questions about the text. I took the opportunity to tell the students that there Aborigines lived and talked many languages. Then that the Englishmen arrived to conquer their lands and impose their language and that long after these Englishmen in America distanced from England and became the Americans we know nowadays.

In the first lesson, the students were given vocabulary related to landscapes, and through some coordinate lines, they had to construct “there is” and “there are” sentences, asking questions and answering them. With the activities, the students not only learnt sentence, statement and answer formation but learnt new useful vocabulary.

In the second hour, I developed my third session, for which I had prepared a Power Point presentation with sound effects and multiple option questions to which I added some “aids”, meaning the students were the presenters of the program and the participants as well, being allowed to ask their classmates for help by using the “asking aid”, the “50% reduction aid” and the “spectators’ aid”. The activities worked really well and truly caught the attention of the students. When one failed and gave a wrong answer, the next student had the possibility to answer the question and so on, until the end of the game. Through the game I answered questions and reflected on the answers given, promoting some discussion and funny moments taking place.

When the students finished the quiz game, I gave them some worksheets with a chart of notes about Tim’s travel to London, and the students would have to interpret the chart so as to fully answer the questions in past. Although they did not finish, I told them we would continue the next day, because they had to do the school trip to Sweden and it would help them remember what we had been working with. As a whole, I really enjoyed teaching this lesson. Today I was more confident than ever, and not having to worry as much about time by skipping a similar activity, I improved my classroom management skills in comparison to previous sessions. Today I have been given the opportunity to check that sometimes less quantity and a better quality is better than the opposite. When we finished the lesson, some students told the other class pupils what we had done, as if it was something incredible. I really enjoyed the experience and I am glad the students liked it as well.

On the next session, I will focus on writing, finishing tasks and making a small summary of all things worked through during my stay, as well as practice some reading too. This way, I will keep on combining different types of activities in order to work with as many aspects of the communicative competence as possible. In the break I talked to some teachers about the school musical and the trip some of them were going to do, and some students showed me their electricity works made. Most of them were the classic interrupter - light bulb and battery one, but some of them were like a quiz contest in which connecting the right questions with their correct answers would turn on the light bulb.

In the lesson after the break, the students were given the battleship template to practice verb question formation in the past. I helped the students all the time, focusing on those who had more difficulties, in order to help them take place in the activity at the same time they learnt and made good English speech productions in their speaking interventions.

In the afternoon, I spent the time helping children to answer a dynamic activity in which the students were given different notes about what they had hypothetically done during last week. They were asked to make questions and answer the questions in pairs, by being able to move freely through the classroom and asking their classmates to find out about them and the coincidences between their examples and their own activities, once they had properly understood the activity instructions. We developed the same lesson with another group and I was helping and making sure the students performed the tasks correctly, telling them how to come with difficulties.

Day 10: Tenth day

Today I have gone to the reading session during the first minutes. I arrived early and the student from Pakistan sat in front of me, as usual. I had brought my book and controlled the students picked up one as well and read. As more students were coming, they sat at the end of the class, and I told the one from Pakistan that we were the brave ones for sitting in the first row. He laughed and said something similar in English too.

Then he picked up a book about the romans and I told him Romulus and Remus were said to be the founders of Rome, having been brought up by a female wolf, or what is the same: “that the hyena was a female wolf in truth, which had looked after the siblings when they were babies.” We said it was interesting and the teacher arrived and asked some students to read aloud.

When we came back to the English class, the teacher gave a teacher-centered lesson explaining the formation of regular and irregular verbs in past, building up a chart from the students’ examples. There was little to do here, except to help some children with specific doubts about some verbs’ past tenses. The session was clear and the students got an accurate idea.

In the second hour, the sixth grade students were finishing their “saving the Earth” drawings and proposals so as to send these to the ones in charge of the project, in hope to compete against other schools participant in it. While the students finished, the teacher reviewed the students’ exam corrections and asked the ones who had finish to classify a bountiful set of object flashcards into their belonging recycling bins. A lot of interesting vocabulary came up, and some students were copying the words they did not know in their notebooks, in order to remember them. I was helping them with some words, like “ink cartridge”, and I learnt some others, such as “cutlery”. When we finished we went to the playground.

Back in P5 class, I tried to copy the music festival recordings I had made into the teacher’s computer, but the system did not support such big files, so I had to change my plans and try to send them to her through the internet. During the lesson, the children worked with the digital blackboard, and I helped the students with some doubts about clothes, the topic they were learning through the games played at the digital blackboard.

In the afternoon a child explained her science project, which was really interesting: being it about the decomposition of light into different colors. 

Later on, the 5^th grade students were asked the exam corrections made some speaking review activities related to the sentence formation of “there is/there are” both in their positive and negative sentences in questions, answers and statements. At the end of the class, some students played a game consisting on filling the blanks with words belonging to a specific semantic field beginning with the given letter. It was fun and one student who did not apparently have such a good English level as his peers surprised everyone with his huge word list.

Day 9: Session # 2

Today, in the first session, the students have been working with the text book, doing some exercises they had to finish. Some students asked the teacher to correct their science “saving the earth” projects, so as to be able to publish them in the magazine and to take part in the contest. As the teacher was busy correcting exam corrections the children had made out of the previous exam they sat on, I decided to help her by correcting the child’s science project text. The teacher wanted to make sure that I did it properly so she tried to correct my own correction of the child’s work, but when she saw it she told me that it was all correct.

In the second hour, I had to teach my second lesson. I began by asking the children if they could remember what they did in last session, where they read Liam’s E-mail. Some students raised their hands and told me he had gone to a football match, played computer games and went to the circus. I told the students that today we were going to work about the circus, asking them what was there on the circus.

They gave me more names than the ones I had in my flashcards, so I decided to make a list in the blackboard, explaining who was who. I took the opportunity to show the students how to look for these words in an online dictionary, in order for them to practice pronunciation at home.

Then the teacher told me to finish my lesson earlier so as to give her 10 minutes to give the students their exams back for them to correct and check mistakes, so I had to do everything faster than planned. Some student said there were animals in the zoo as well, and another replied that was bad, situation that I would have benefited from discussing at that moment, but in fear of not having enough time would the discussion extend for too long, I said we would comment on that later.

Then, I told the students we were going to read a song about a circus, and I gave them the worksheets with song lyrics. I asked them to highlight all verbs they could find, and we corrected them later. After that, the students had to read aloud and try to explain what they understood out of each paragraphs. While some ones were easy, others were too difficult to understand had not the students been told some strategies I did not have the time to explain because of having 10 minutes less than the time I had planned the session for. However, by highlighting the verbs and giving explanations in English, plus making gesticulations and putting examples to convey meanings, I managed to make all the students understand the idea of the song, and some students understand the whole paragraphs.

While the activity highly motivated some students more than ever, who were challenged by facing a difficult task to accomplish, the ones with difficulties lost part of their interest, because of them not being able to achieve what their partners did. It was lightning, and some students were excited about the weather, but I managed to control the class and move on to the next activity. Then I told them Nellie the Elephant was a tale of an elephant that did not like the circus and escaped from it, and I asked them if they thought having animals in the circus was good or not. I told them sometimes, the animals were not given food if they did not do the tricks they were asked, and that keeping them in cages was not either fair, reason why nowadays’ circus have not animals anymore. I showed the students a picture of cirque du solei and reminded them the vocabulary we had been working with before and finally played the song for them, which they liked.

After the break the children spent in class, the teacher showed the P5 students some flashcards and placed these on different tables. The students had to find them, and I helped them with the activities. After that, we showed them flashcards and another song to talk about things they were wearing. I used to show them what I was wearing and helped them with the statements.

In the afternoon, I went to 1^st group, where the students were asked to color some pages from the English book with the other English teacher. I helped her with classroom management, by making sure the students followed a listening exercise and did the tasks they were asked to perform. In order to deal with disruptive behavior, I moved from table to table and asked the students about what they had colored so far, in an activity where they had to color a drawing with different parts, making them tell me which objects did they had so far and what colors these were in a single sentence, placing the adjectives before the nouns. This helped quite a lot, because the students focused on what I was saying and it became more challenging for them.

In second B I helped the students with doubts about the exam all the time, and got familiar with most of them. They wanted to jump as tall as I was, and I asked them if they were going to invite me to the party which was held in the pamphlets they were given. At the end of the session, I made them pick up their things and go back home. This afternoon I had participated a lot in helping the students with doubts and with the classroom, and I think this will help me in the future to know what to do as a teacher.

Day 8: The school music festival

Today, in the first hour, I have gone to secretary and asked for the practical coordinator. It turned out she was there, so I told her about the work plan and signature, and she asked me to come back during the break, as she had to explain me what I would be doing the week the English teacher will be travelling to Sweden with the children.

Then, I went to the 6^th grade English speaking class with the English teacher. She had prepared two worksheets with an untidy room and items or objects to find. Students were placed in pairs and they had to ask each other questions in order to find the items they did not have on their drawing in contrast to their partner one. The students had to work with prepositions. I was helping the students all the time, correcting a student’s unfinished natural science project from the last day and helping the children formulate correct questions in the past, at the time I was giving them some tips with vocabulary and preposition meanings and usages.

At the beginning it was difficult for me to explain word meanings without having to use too complex vocabulary for them to understand. However, I grew better with practice, as in the second hour I did not have any trouble in defining or explaining anything the students asked me or that I saw they needed some help with, by only using English. I think in two more sessions I will do it automatically, without having to grasp for the best way to define or explain something in English, in a way that could be easily be understood. I made sure all the students worked, and we rehearsed the lyrics of the music festival once.

 During the break, I went back to secretary and the practical’s coordinator signed the work plan. After the break, the students went to the gym and practiced the dance and English songs for the festival again. Sometimes I told the students to help me with the furniture arrangement and helped giving my view on some aspects which could be polished, as well as positive feedback to the children who put a big effort into it. Thanks to the tutor indications, the children managed to perform the dance in a more coordinated way than last days’.

In the afternoon, I talked to 5^th grade tutor: today is the big day! And he laughed. I went to the classroom and took the children to the gym, where the music festival was going to take place. Many parents attended and in a few minutes the room was crowded with visitors. The students of 5^th and 6th grade performed different songs with a piano base and some others from the respective English course books. In the end, of the act, the students performed the dance, which was a success. Making the students sing and dance in English at the same time caught their parents’ attention, and greeting at the public as they were leaving the scenery with the music was also wonderfully successful. During the act, I sometimes talked to the parents and about where they could sit, helping the teachers to establish the necessary order in the crowd. In the end the music festival was a success, and we went happily back home.

Day 7: My first session.

Today I went with the children to the reading class. Some students I knew already from the playground or the lessons picked up a chair for me when I arrived, and so I thanked them. After the speaking session the teacher and I went to 6^th grade English classroom, and the students continued with the exam corrections. When they finished correcting, the ones who had taken place in and won the Science Fair contest showed their projects to their peers. There were some interesting projects such as one about dividing white light from the sun to all the colors that form it and another one about electricity and a circuit, consisting of a light bulb, two cables and the battery.

In the second hour I had asked the teacher to bring in the Course book CD for my first session, but she told me to use the digital book instead to do a listening, and I agreed. Having not been able to fully know what the students had been working with and how, due to the school musical rehearsals, the science projects and the final trip to Switzerland preparations, I had prepared my first lesson out of two page scans from the 5^th grade text book, the primary official curriculum and my imagination, bringing-in all the materials and worksheets prepared by me, copies printed in order to avoid trouble or to have to postpone my sessions again.

The classroom began with me telling the students they would read an E-mail from Liam to his friend Paul about his birthday (both of which were characters in the text book, known by them). I asked the students if they knew which verb tense would Liam use, knowing she did it to talk about the events occurred in the past. Many students raised their hands, and I told them to first tell me their name – I had not been given the classroom list nor been able to ask all of them yet - and then answer the question for all of their classmates to hear. Then, I gave them the work sheet I had prepared about the reading. I told them to fill the gaps in the text with verbs in past simple tense from the box. After some minutes, I told them I would do a listening and they would write down what they hear, in order to check their answers. According to my plan, it had to be a listening exercise, but having to open the book through the digital blackboard, I was unwillingly showing them the page with the answers, reason why I wanted to use the CD player instead of the digital course book. When the 5 minutes went by, I asked the students if they knew the answers. Some had not finished because they were not sure of 1 or 2 answers out of 20, so I decided to correct the exercise aloud, as planned. However, I realized that after having heard the recording once and tried to do the exercise as planned, some students were cheating, checking the answers in their course book or at the digital blackboard. Then, I decided to tell all the students to use the book and self-correct, as it was not fair that some students had cheated. In doing so, I wanted to avoid a situation in which the students who had copied the answers from the book got them right, while the ones who had done the activity as they were asked to, felt embarrassed by making mistakes and did not want to participate later.

The change in planning was positive, because I avoided a possible conflict and we could do a classroom final self-correction where all the students could read some forms aloud, and ask some questions about the verb tenses. Some of them were quite complex to explain, but I managed to do it by using the English language most of the time, and they understood. When we finished correction, we moved on to the next activity. I made the students some comprehension questions about the text, and corrected them the use of past tenses in past verb tenses, but in a way they would not feel embarrassed to participate and try. When doing so, I made sure to give all the students the chance to participate, giving priority to those who had not intervened yet.

After that, I asked for two volunteers to give the students two work sheets: one with another e-mail and one with a verb chart. Although the activity seemed similar to the last one, it was a different way to perform it. I explained the students that this E-mail was about my own birthday party, and that they had to fill the gaps with past verb tense with the verb chart I had given them. This time, though, they would not work listening but reading, and each student would read a sentence aloud with the answer given. The children had not this E-mail on the text book and this time all of them performed well. Occasional errors were discussed aloud, in a way I tried to make their own classmates help them before interfering myself. Occasionally though I interfered to make some specific clarifications such as when the infinitive should be kept instead of simple past form in past sentences. E.g.: I went to the zoo to have fun. Sometimes, I wrote sentences at the blackboard for all of the students to see. The children enjoyed reading aloud, and I took the chance to work on pronunciation as well.

Once the activity had been corrected, I answered doubts and moved on to the next activity. In this one, I showed the students some power point slides with some photographs about my birthday party. I told them that now they could ask me anything they wanted to know about it, but using correct past tense question verbs. When I gave them my answers I made sure to change my intonation stressing all past tense verb forms I gave them. This way they would get familiarized with some of them. I told the students with difficulties to use the chart I had given to help them ask the questions. This was a good idea, because students who do not normally participate in oral discourse felt encouraged to ask their own questions as well. It was fully to hear the likes of: “Who won the laser tag game?” “Did your team win the game?” and “Where was the laser-tag you went to?” or “what did you have for lunch?” or “where was the mountain?” When all the students volunteering to ask questions and the ones who did not normally participate had done so, I asked the students if they wanted to keep on with the same activity or to move to the next one, and they said they preferred to change.

I was having a perfect timing, and then, I asked the students to talk about their own birthdays, using past tenses in the chart. Each student made a sentence or two and I encouraged all of them to participate. I had caught their attention because all of them were listening at their classmates. We finished the lesson and the bell rang.

As a whole, I think I have already improved in classroom management, because last year I was too reluctant to make changes from what I had planned, and this time I had effectively made one or two, having better results. I had to clarify a child that he should give away all the work sheets at a time, because otherwise we would lose time and we would not be able to perform the funniest activities in the end, but the students’ behavior was good and their interest and attention was high. Despite some things I would change were I to repeat the session, like deleting one of the two E-mails and working with my own one in a different way, in order to introduce more variation and widen the students’ participation even more, or to write down some question examples or ask for volunteers to make examples of question asking before actually doing the asking activity, I am quite satisfied with the session. I have learnt a lot from today, and I will be polishing those aspects which can be improved.

The students liked my work, because later on, children asked the teacher if I would be doing more sessions, as this one had been fun, and dragging the attention and motivating the students –of course, making sure they learn as well- is very important to me.

During the break time I stayed at the playground and was told by children to have seen a spinner inside a plumb, which was actually surprisingly true. The teachers present and I laughed and I was betting on which spin would win each battle against the other. The child from Pakistan was really skillful, as so were the rest who played. I asked the teacher who the practical coordinator was, but none of them knew, so I went to secretary in order to ask the ones present. They said it might be the head teacher, and told me to come back in the afternoon. In the third class the students worked pronunciation with tongue twisters as usual, and I help some students with their doubts.

During the afternoon, the students were given a work sheet with a text in the past and some questions about it. The students were asked to first read the text aloud, and then read it without telling some pieces of information. They also had some questions in the work sheet to work with. I told some students how to make more complex questions and answers, helping the ones with difficulties as well. All of them finished the task earlier than expected, and the teacher could not believe they had already finished. When the teacher began asking the questions aloud, the students were bored and unwilling to participate. Being aware of that, she decided to turn the activity into a contest, in which only full and correct questions and answers were given some points. This change was a success and it teaches me to feel free to develop the changes I consider necessary, in order to bring my lesson plan into practice. 

In the last hour, we did the same, and I went to see the head teacher to secretary, but she was busy with the school musical and the children’s parents coming to the school, who every day came to see different stage pupils perform their songs and dances, so I decided to come back tomorrow. The fifth grade students did the same activity and have another song rehearsal tomorrow, reason why I will have to wait until next week, in order to do my second session.

Task #3 Classroom Management.

After reading “Maldonado and Olivares (2010), list and describe three assessment episodes of successful classroom management you have observed in your school.

Day 6: Exam corrections and P5 cartoons.

Today, I firstly went to the library for a while as usual, where students spent the first 15 minutes on practicing reading. I brought my own book, in order to encourage the students to read by following my example. A student from Pakistan commented that he did not want to wear black clothes at the music festival because it was said it carried bad luck. I said that was true, as I had heard it said before. The child has a good level of English, as he sometimes creates metaphors and some expressions. A winner in the science project was there as well, and he also has a good level. Students were asked to read aloud, and encouraged to practice more at home if they were not fast and good enough.

Before the first session I had some minutes to discuss when I was going to do my lessons. I was told to do all 5, despite having the travel in the middle, but afterwards the teacher realized they were too busy because of the music festival, the travel and the science session to do all five. Nevertheless, I was told I had made a good job with all the activities I had prepared so far: 3 sessions, which I would begin teaching this Friday.

Back in class, the teacher gave the 6^th grade students an exam to sit on, which they spent the most part of the class doing. There were listening, vocabulary, past tense verbs, locations and directions, silent letters in pronunciation, expressions of the week, and some culture, writing and dictation questions.  I helped the students with some doubts about the exam, and when they finished, I picked up their exams and told them to pick up a book to read.

In the next class, the students were working with their science projects again, and I was helping them with doubts. A Chinese girl and the one from Pakistan had a good level of English, and generally, so did the rest. Another student had already finished the project, and was reading books in English. I tried to help out the ones who were lagging behind. Some doubts were about what to do and others were about the students having vocabulary doubts or lack of ideas, but I helped them continue with their projects.

At the free time I went to the playground, talked a little bit with some teachers and students. Some of them were beginning to know me, and others asked me if I knew a funny and famous trending topic YouTube video. I said yes and laughed. It was nice to highlight there was no gender differentiation between boys and girls in the games they played. All of them played basketball, spinning top, football and with trading cards, regardless of their gender, and they all performed well in what they were doing. The students from P5 and lower stages remained in a balcony below the big patio, and had special tools to play with. Another thing which caught my eye was that children did not cause trouble, in the sense they generally got on well with each other and no-one got punished during the break, something totally different from what I was used to see on many other schools, where conflicts were common.

After the break, I went with the teacher to P5, where she asked the students about the animals they would be seeing the next day in the zoo, and showed them a song about animals later on. I knew the song, as I already knew most of the others from other lessons, so I began singing and dancing the songs with the children. Afterwards, they were shown some cartoons about the Triplets when they were younger, and it was interesting because these were related to the vocabulary the children had been working with about clothes. The teacher is really good and regardless the huge amount of tasks she had to face during these days, it was plain she enjoys teaching.

 In the afternoon and evening, the children were told to correct their exams, by copying the wrong sentences in the correct way and comment on some errors aloud. 

Day 5: Preparing for the School Musical

Today the teacher has told me the science fair was a success. The children seemed happy with the idea of contest, and the project enhanced creativity and curiosity for science. Today all the school was on their preparations for the music festival. Rehearsals with all classes were going to take place for all of the morning, meaning 3 lines of P5 and 2 lines of P3, P4 1^ST, 2^ND 3^RD, 4^TH, 5^TH and6^TH grade. Aside from the song per class based on Tintin cartoons, in which the music teacher played the piano and the children sang, the students had to sing an English song.

This means I could not do any session this week, because the group I have been given to develop the session is only with the teacher for Monday and Tuesdays, and on Friday the children will have to sit on an exam. I am already planning activities in order to have them ready for the week there is no travel and no music festival.

The children were doing ok, although some of the songs were similar to each other and doing the rehearsals took huge amounts of time. The ones I liked the most were one of the English one about the children’s sister being the best one in the world”, which has a funny and original choreography, and my teacher ones, which included the only dance in which students also had to sing in English, and another one about directions they had been practicing. The second grade song about the pirates was funny as well. I stayed there, making sure all the children behaved well and recorded the sixth grade students’ dance.

In the evening I went to 1^st and 2nd grade to practice the songs with the children. I already knew the second one and began dancing it with the teachers who were sharing the lesson. Sadly, I will miss the festival because it will be on Thursday, but having seen the rehearsal I have an idea on how it will go. Teachers commented it was time-demanding as it took lessons time but it was due to the Anniversary of the school and parents were invited, being an important event for the school.

Day 4: Fourth day: The Science projects

Today the students have been working pronunciation through tongue twisters. During the lessons, each student had a plasticized card with a tongue twister, and after some practice, the students were asked to say the tongue twister aloud for their partners to hear. The teacher corrected them when necessary, making them repeat the correct sounds in the language. Sometimes, she used phonetic symbols the children were already familiarized with in order to convey meanings. I helped the children with their pronunciation, answering questions about how to pronounce certain sounds the children had more difficulties with.

In the second hour, the teacher was going to repeat the same class with another group, but had to leave for some minutes. I gave the students the tongue twisters, gave them some minutes and began to ask these to them, the way the teacher did on last class. When she came back I helped the children with doubts and difficulties with certain sounds. I also helped a child with special needs, one who had a lower level than the rest of the classroom for being a newcomer. I helped him with some flashcard games he was doing.

During the break I stayed at the playground and talked to some children. They told me they liked to play with spinning tops, and also football and with the elastic rubbers you can make bracelets with.

After the break, the children had to prepare the song for next week’s music festival, so we all went to the gym and saw them dance. I gave some suggestions about how to end the song and helped the teachers with classroom management when I was asked. The song was funny and, despite some small errors I know it will be all right.

In the afternoon I helped the teacher making a sign for the science fair, an event the school was organizing for the same day, in which participants were given the chance to win a band for the most original, the most demanding and the most interesting projects. It was an interesting idea. In the second hour I helped the children with another song they were preparing for the music festival.

Day 3: Third day

Today fifth grade students had to sit on an exam. To my surprise, and contrary to what I thought, the children do have books to read in English on their English classroom breaks and free time. After finishing some of their tasks, students are able to pick up a book in English and read. Another thing to point out is maybe the children are still on their silent period, reason why they do not talk as much, but still comprehend almost anything I you might tell them, which is a huge achievement for 5^th primary students.

During the second hour I talked to the teacher about my project, and how I thought developing the science project according to the book might be too challenging for the type of exam the students are used to sit on. The teacher was of my view, and we came up to the agreement of giving Standard English lessons, which would allow me to develop more sessions than planned. She was really supportive and permeable with me, and I think this weekend I will plan truly meaningful activities the children will probably learn from and enjoy.

During the break I stayed in the patio, talking to the teachers and helping some children who, in a polite way, asked me to help them pick up a ball that had been laid stocked on the basketball ring or basket. I talked to them for a while, as usual, and then went back to the 5^th grade B classroom, where the English teacher was substituting for another one. She made a review and advanced with book contents at the time she complemented these with her usual huge input of English use and productions.

During the evening the teacher had “speaking classroom”, where she had cleverly written names on the classic battleship game for the children to produce sentences, interacting with the children in English when needed. I helped a children with difficulties with a flashback activity and the other the students with the game. This afternoon I participated in the classroom more than ever, which is something I like. In the second hour the teacher left the room for two minutes and it shocked me a lot to hear the students asking me to explain the game meanwhile. And so did I, explained the game rules according to the teachers’ own preferences and modifications, and all children were listening to me, curious, while the teacher came back and allowed me to continue for a while, until I needed the worksheets to go into deeper detail. However, I managed to do it pretty well, and I think this will be a nice warming up for my future sessions with the class. Next, I helped the students with the game, and with their doubts until the lessons finished.

Summary and reflection of the reading: "Rethinking classroom management"

According to Natalia Maldonado and Pilar Olivares, when talking about classroom management we should talk about teaching and learning management, and when talking about behavior management we should talk about behavior for learning.

The main aim of teaching and learning management is to provide the students with a successful teaching and learning experience and, in order to achieve this, organizational management (dealing with discipline), curriculum management (organizing and developing lessons which take into account the aims, objectives, contents and competencies required) - and social issues (proper social relations established between peers, which can favor learning experiences) should be taken into account, as often each area directly affects the other ones.

As far as I have seen, organizational management does not work if curriculum management or social issues are not coped with properly. At the school center I am in, the English teacher I am working with makes a perfect curriculum management, as she gives all lessons in English and makes pupils participate and understand what she is saying, which results in an effective organizational management, scarcely needing to call the attention of children presenting disruptive behavior. I believe taking into account all these issues as interrelated parts of teaching and learning management is essential for me and my future practice.

In regards to creating an effective organizational management, rights and duties must be clear and explicit, being rules created out of a process of negotiation. These work better when describing desired behaviors, when followed by the whole community and when teachers do not see this negotiation as a waste of time, being consistent in its application and the process is interactive. Also, establishing routines for the students to take an active role in problem-solving is key, especially to prevent conflictive situation from taking place, reminding them of the importance that following this rules plays in creating an ordered environment which fosters learning.

When talking about curriculum management, it is the school’s job to develop it according to its context and their students’ needs. This means enabling pupils to think deeply and critically on the activities, giving them the chance to become creative and enabling all of them to respond positively to challenges and responsibilities. In order to achieve this, lessons must be appealing, including meaningful tasks aimed at the age group, at the time extra differentiated support is given to all learners, so as to prevent some of them from being excluded of our lessons. Knowing most retention information rates belong to practicing, discussion and are followed by the presence of audiovisual media, followed by reading and listening, lessons should include cooperative and individual learning, being the most effective kind of learning that of including the most effective retention rates. Work group increases pupils’ self-esteem, improving oral skills and promoting social skills, while individual learning develops self-discipline.

 Moving on to social issues, students must be given an active role in their learning process, where the affective side must be taken into account. They must take a safe learning in the classroom, being accepted by what they are. Respect should take place both from students to the teacher and from the teacher towards the students. Optimism and good expectations help.