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.