This week has been filled with learning experiences for me and new relationships. I documented how each day went in a journal this week because I had been forgetting what had really happened each day of the week.
Starting with Monday morning I knew it would be a rough week or a week full of change! It was the first time that I can remember a lesson completely flopping...to the point that I couldn't even get the students excited using songs, chant or any of my movement games. Don't get me wrong, I am used to having lessons not go as I thought they would or have to change lessons on the spot, but this was beyond that. I changed the lesson and the activities as soon as I saw the students becoming disengaged with the lesson, but it didn't seem to matter. No matter how funny I tried to be or how much I tried to get them involved the class just seemed dead. I completely lost the class and I have never felt so bad and helpless in my life! The class that I was teaching was 2nd grade and the topic was the short /a/ sound...not my favorite, but I thought I'd try to just a curriculum book. NEVER again...at least not as closely as I tried to. Normally I can punt and get the students attention and get them to interact with me again, but it didn't work this time. I think the problem was the topic and the fact that I was not excited about the activities that I had planned for the class. I was bored with it and I should have known that it would be just as boring for the students. Needless to say I changed my lesson for the next day! I taught rhyming instead.
My 4th grade class however went excellently. I played bingo with them using the sentence from their text book " What do you want?" I had the review the question and the response then use it to call the bingo cards. After reviewing the sentences that would be used, we discussed the words that they would use in the sentence. For example, " I want pizza please." I wrote all of the words on the board for the students to look at for spelling and to be able to remember what words we were going to use.I gave each student a blank bingo card and told them to write down one of the words on the board in each box. The students did that and then we would all ask, "what do you want" and the student that got to call the word had to answer with the sentence, "I want(word), please." It went very well and all the students were engaged in listening and speaking. I repeated this activity with the 4th grade class on Tuesday also, but had to do a little bit more practicing of the words and I gave them more time to write down the words. I had a lot of fun!
This is a short clip of my third grade storytelling group doing a sequencing activity.
My lesson for the 2nd grade went okay on Tuesday, but I felt like I needed some feedback from someone so I went to talk to Ellen. She had not watched my lessons that week, but I told her about it and asked for advice. She was very helpful and willing to talk with me any time. We talked for 45minutes and I got some great tips from her. She was honored that I asked for her advice and I think we will become good resources for each other. After talking with her it made me wish even more that I was in her classroom all of the time! She had great ideas and told me to focus more on the English part of the lesson and not so much on the content, which is different from what I will be doing when I get back to the US, but here that's exactly what I need to do. I also had my storytelling after school program today and they were great! I love teaching them.
When I went home on Tuesday I was determined to change the structure of my lessons and so I searched YouTube.com and found a very good seminar called teach English EFL/ESL. There are 6 sections to the seminar and I watched all of them!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_barTKxikvA
It gave me great new ideas and ways to organize my lessons so that the students would be excited about learning English. My classes on Wednesday went AMAZING. I wish I would have found this before I started teaching, but at least I found it when I did.
On Thursday I was really missing home and was looking at all of the assignments that I have due in the next month. I let myself become overwhelmed and started to stress because Francis is coming to visit me in November and I want to be able to spend time with him, but that also means I only had 43 days to finish everything. The classes I taught went well and and so did the writing group that I had after school.
Friday, I was very tired and had a lot to do. My lessons went well once again and I decided that I really liked the new organization for my lessons that I'm using. The students seem to be more focused when i start the new content and seem to have a little more fun too!
Saturday and Sunday were filled with conference seminars. Falyn, Erin, Keely and I went to the KOTESOL conference. It was so good! I used to go to conferences in WI and tried to go to the NAEYC conferences as often as I could and this was similar. It is the annual international conference and there were so many 'english' speaking people there. I learned new techniques and received free teaching books which I was very excited about. I wish that Soongin would have sent their teachers to it to get new ideas on how to teach English to students. I have 15 pages of notes to go through now and apply what I learned to my classes that I am going to be teaching next week. Some of the seminars that I went to were called, Politeness to Participation, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple and Stimulating), Classroom Management:Supportive, Corrective, and Preventative Measures, Effective Ways of Approaching Speaking Classes for Children, Teaching Practice a Reflective Approach to the Classroom and one my Ken Beatty that I didn't get the name of because it was a last minutes decision to attend it. (I loved it though)
I have a busy week ahead of me and can't wait to see how the 1st and 3rd graders like the changes I've made to my teaching. I love going to teacher conferences and learning from other teachers and professionals that are in my field. I realized that even when I graduate I will always enjoy learning new things and I want to be a life long learner!
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