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.