Second Class- English Access

Hello every one! Time goes fast and I taught the second class the last Monday. Well, this time I cannot say that it was a good experience because it was not well at all, but I just understood that we can learn from bad and good experiences.

This time I needed to lead with some uncomfortable situations which made me feel angry, nervous, and I got desperate, so I could not teach a good class as my students deserved. The point is that I had prepared everything and that problem was that someone “stole” some time from my class, and I could not perform the wrap up.

Just moving on, I taught the use of the “Possessive ‘s”. As a warm up, I made a short brainstorm using a game named “The broken telephone”. I divided the class into two groups. Students made two lines, and I told the last student a sentence using Possessive adjectives and Possessive pronouns. The students  whispered  the sentence and the first one must write down the sentence on the board. I made that activity because those were the topics that they learned before.

Then, for the presentation I show them a video on the use of the Possessive ‘s, and of course after that, it was time to teach the grammar part. I provide many examples per each rule, and of course some charts using nice colors because I considered that It was a nice way to catch their attention.

I provided many activities, such as: fill in the blanks, and of course some free practice activities in order to them to speak because they love speaking in the class.

To sum up, I can say that I just learned a lot from that experience, and I hope to have a better one the next class.

First class (Second period)

I am so glad because I started teaching the last Monday. I am teaching in English Access, and those guys are really nice. They participate in the class, they are not shy, they like to share with teachers, they are so respectful, and the best, they love English, so they put all their effort to learn it because they consider that it is great opportunity for their future.

Well, as you know, it is really difficult to prepare a class, especially when you need to teach at first time in a group that you do not really know, so what comes to your mind is: Which activities do I need to use to teach them, especially if they are teenagers?...

I needed to teach “Possessive adjectives”. It seems as an easy topic, but if you do not use the correct methodology, it can become complicated for you and for your students, so at first, it did not know which one I needed to use, and on Sunday it was really worried because the teacher sent me the lesson plan the night before to teach, so I just needed to prepare everything in some hours. It was really complicated, and I did not sleep that night thinking about it.  The first that comes to my mind was to look for a song to teach that topic, so I found a song named: “Ours” by Taylor Swift. I used that song as warm up. They formed groups of six students each, and they needed to order the song that was cut in sentences (sentence strips) I played the song two times, and at the second one they ordered it. At the end, we sang the song, and I was glad because all of them did a nice job ordering and singing it. 

For the next activities, I used some activities from the book because the teacher asked me to do it. It was complicated because I did not have enough time to make all the activities, and I have the time per each activity in my lesson plan, but sometimes some things can happen when you are teaching, and you always waste time. A mother of a student came to the class to talk with the teacher, so he asked to stop the class, and I waste around five minutes. Nevertheless, I developed my activities, and I think my students learn well the topic because they perfectly made all the activities in the oral and written form. 

Now, what I can say is that I am eager to teach the next week because I am sure that I can make a better job, and I just hope to have more time to prepare my lesson plan.