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.