Lesson Plans Part 2 and Final Reflection

A Case of Study

A Case of Study

In this opportunity, I would like to talk about some students that had showed a lot of improvement with their English classes from March until those days. The first kid is Alejandro. He is a 13-years-old boy that used to be very shy the first time he came to my English academy. He was incredibly quiet, almost speechless, but he did well all the written exercises that I asked him to do. Alejandro was pretty excellent in grammar and also with listening activities but the speaking and reading part had to be activated (maybe the correct word here would be “motivated”) immediately. The months were passing and I was giving him some easy activities to work with his reading and pronunciation part, and he liked that! Alejandro knew he was good in English but also, he knew that he had to move forward. One of the activities he liked the most was that one in which I played an English song (to be more specific, a romantic song. That kind of song tend to be slow and easy to understand) and he had to fill in the blanks to complete the lyrics gave by me. That encourages him listen the song over and over again until he finished the lyric. Once the lyric was completed, he spent the rest of the class singing along and learning the pronunciation that the singer was using. I remember he asked me several times “but teacher, what the heck is “gonna, wanna and gotta? This is confusing!” and I explained to him that they were just “going to, want to and got to” in a short form. Nowadays, Alejandro is in 8^th grade and he had a lot of A’s in English at his school. He told me he had some oral presentations and all of them were perfect because his speaking part was more developed and he could speak more fluent than the previous presentations.

On the other hand, there is Angela, a cutie 5-years-old girl, who was the shyest person I’ve ever met.  The first time I saw her, she was crying and holding her father’s leg because she didn’t want to be in my classroom with me and the rest of the children. The days were passing and Angela continued working but in complete silence. She was afraid of saying “hello” to me, even in Spanish. At the beginning I was so frustrated because she didn’t speak at all. But suddenly, a day of September, she arrived to my classroom and said all the greetings I had taught her. I thought she forgot everything because she seemed unable to repeat what I was explaining to her, but no, that day she came and said “hello” to me and the children and also she shared with the rest of the class and spoke using English vocabulary. From that moment on, I could use more activities with her and she had a really good performance on them. One of the activities she loved the most was “Boo and cheering”. Today, everything she listens, she boos it or cheers it. I am so proud of her.   

Lesson Plans Part 1

Lesson Plans

Assessment

Assessment

For this activity, I selected a diagnostic test, which is applied to every new student the first day of classes at Little Big Students Academy. The diagnostic test is about all the basic vocabulary in English for beginners, such as animals, colors, family members and so on.

The elements that I assessed with this test are pronunciation (because the diagnostic test is answered orally) and vocabulary about easy topics in English.

I am assessing the speaking part, so what I ask them to do, is to name 10 things in English. For example: Name 10 animals. If the student answers the 10 animals, he/she will get 4 points. But, if he/she doesn't answer anything, he/she will get only 1 point.

In my diagnostic test, 4 is the highest and 1 the lowest rating. So that turns the diagnostic test into a rubric itself. Here you have the sample.

The application stage of this diagnostic test was very easy. It was applied individually to each new student. He/she was in front of the teacher and then, I began to encourage him/her to answer the questions. Actually, they are not real questions. They are like orders that students should follow as much as they now. For example: name 10 animals in English.

Something that I had to take into account is that some of the children were scared because of the test. They think it was a big evaluation and became a little bit nervous, so I tried to keep them relaxed and explain to them that I did that only to check if they know too much English or nothing about the language. The rest of the test was developed successfully. By the end of it, me as teacher had to read the results again and determine which were the topics that the child failed in order to begin his/her learning process from that lesson on. If a child gets three topics with a rate of 2 or 1, I must teach those three topics first and then, the ones with rates of 4 or 3. That makes me be more organized according to the order of the lessons of each kid.

All the results I had obtained from the entire diagnostics test I had applied were good and not so good. As we know, every student is totally different from other students and I remember some of them that answered all the questions with a rate of 4 (more than perfect), but some of them, answered with a rate of 1. It means that the child was a huge blank space ready to be filled in with the help of the teacher.    

I personally believe that diagnostic tests of this kind are very useful for the teacher and also for the students. Is a very good tool to know the level of English of your students and it is easy to create.

Second Reflection

                             Reflections

Hi everyone! For this second record of work, I want to begin describing a teaching strategy I have applied so far with my children, here in my English Academy called “Little Big Students”. My little group is formed by kids from 5 to 11 years old. The strategy is called “apples and bananas”. This strategy is about singing a song that says “I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas” and then, singing again the same sentence but with the different sounds of each vowel. So the song, with letter A sound, goes like this: “I like to eit, eit, eit, eipples and beineineis” then with E sound, I, O and U. It is a very easy song for them but powerful at the same time, because it helps them to establish a relationship between each vowel with their sounds, which is very important for me as a teacher. I say it is important for me because, one of the things that didn’t go so well is when my kids confuse the vowel sound in English with their sounds in Spanish, for example: sometimes I asked “which is this letter?” pointing at letter E, and they say “ei” instead of “i”. This is absolutely frustrating for me so that’s why I took a decision of applying that “apples and bananas song” to make them practice all the vowel sounds. From now on, I will keep applying this strategy into my daily teaching practice. For me, it’s perfect and I won’t change anything from it.

Here you have the video of the “apples and bananas” song. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqtlgIh5cY&feature=youtu.be

As you know, pronunciation is essential in English, and teach it should be a little challenging for us as teachers, but not impossible. A good strategy that I would apply with my bigger students will be “questions using minimal pairs”. I consider that minimal pair’s activities will have a good reception from my bigger students because it can be funny for them to know that one word can be very similar to another word. Another complement for this activity can be the exaggerated articulation of the words in order to make students comprehend the word carefully.

Another important thing that I have learnt here in this course is to give instructions to the students. I mean, I used to say to them what they were supposed to do and that’s it. But now, that changed. Now, I give them instructions and then make my students repeat what I said to make sure they got the information or the steps to complete the task correctly. First, it was a little bit disappointing because the first time I asked “what did I say?” none of my kids answered, but they learnt fast and now, they follow my instructions on the rest of the activities. What a good feeling!

By the way, there is something I would like to try. I was thinking on combine the identification of errors and mistakes with a ball throwing game. I would like to ask my students to make a circle, then write a correct or incorrect sentence (or word, if they are too young) on the blackboard and throw a ball. The student, who receives the ball, should explain to the rest of the class why the sentence (or word) is incorrect or correct. That can be an excellent idea!

First Reflection

 Reflections

When I started this course, I did it with so many expectations of myself. It seemed very interesting for me the content of the whole course, so I got in.

My main goals by the end of this course is to grow up as a good teacher, taking into consideration my personal motivation, the students' needs and our ability to work together as a group. I always have considered that learning from your students as well as they learn from you, is one of the most important things in the learning process. It can be achieved if you know how to create the perfect environment inside the classroom.

On the other hand, when we discussed about lesson planning, I remembered a lot of things that I was about to forget. That's why I work with kids at my own English Academy and I don't use a lesson plan itself. My classes are planned by levels and divided into lessons, and that's it. But having a lesson plan could be absolutely useful. It helps you to memorize and organize what you teach, what your students learn and to establish an aim.

I would like to teach English in a practical way, not only grammatical, because grammar tend to be boring to the students and when you are creating a lesson plan, you have to remember that it will be based on your students, not based on the teacher. I prefer to focus on working with real material and real examples to make them be in touch with the language itself. I personally believe that what I do well is to keep a balance between written exercises and oral exercises, sometimes I use too much grammar or only written exercises and that didn't go so well, and if I do another lesson plan again, I would take into consideration the ages, strengths, weaknesses and other important aspects of my students.

This can be applied for the use of:

Technology inside the classroom: I show multimedia material to my students in order to make them work with songs in English, which is something I do well. But sometimes my students want to do another thing on the computer not related with the content I was trying to teach, so technology can be distracting sometimes, that didn't go so well, so that's why I can use the tools I learnt here in this course, such as comics creator, word games, web pages, and so on to make my students have fun while they're learning.

Teaching grammar: every teacher knows that grammar is important but it is a part of speech difficult to explain. I teach very well all the structures, but there are many structures that can be confusing to the students and teachers should adapt the content to the students to make them understand better. Something that didn't go so well is the fact that all students think that grammar is only used in written language. It's true, it is used in written language but it doesn't mean that they are not going to use the structure in oral language anymore. So, what would I change? I would change their concept about grammar maybe applying inductive or deductive methods and also, I can use visual aids or songs to explain a grammatical structure, written or orally.

Teaching vocabulary: one of the things I know I do really well is repetitions drills for teaching vocabulary. Kids love to repeat the words I say and play with them. What didn't go so well is trying to apply the same strategy with teenagers. Sometimes they don't pay attention to the teacher, they don't want to be treated like parrots, so that's when I try to combine simple vocabulary they are used to use every day with their equivalent in English. That went well because, for teenagers, is a not-so-formal way of learning and recording new vocabulary and they feel more comfortable about it.