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.