Feeling like a teacher for a day

Hello again, everyone!

I am happy to be writing this entry today. I have been truly enjoying this practicum period and I am very excited to be able to share my experiences with all of you; as well as reading your own experiences and thoughts through your blog entries.

I know that we are all on the same boat right now and that we are finding ourselves with some free time on our hands. Hence why I wanted to share some exciting things that I have been experiencing these past two weeks.

Just like I have shared with you on different occasions, I am very happy with the teachers that I have been with this past month. She is truly a great teacher, who uses different multimodal resources to teach her classes and does not follow rigidly the traditional methods. I know that I can offer activities and participate in the lessons freely when I am with her in fifth and sixth grade. What I am really excited about is that she trusts me to do so, too.

Last week, she told me that I could feel free to choose a day to be in charge of the whole lesson, bringing my own activities and designing the session on my own. I chose to practice with sixth grade since they are the class that I will be in the following months. So I planned a lesson in which they could practice the Past Tense and the Wh questions because that had an exam about that on the following week.

I had to design a 45 minutes lesson, so I knew that there were limited activities that I could and would be able to complete. Nevertheless, I planned more activities than I knew would fit in the session so that I would not be empty-handed. I wanted to come up with activities that allowed the students practice their writing, challenge them to experiment with the language, and have fun while doing so.

As a first activity, I wrote an email. This email contained some vocabulary that I knew they would ask about, as well as simple and easy-to-understand vocabulary. The reason behind this is that I wanted to keep it in their level, but also challenge them to come up with the definitions and meaning of some expressions and words on their own, with the help of the context and explanations in English given by me in order to scaffold them. The email was addressed to a «friend» of mine, who I wanted to share with my adventures in Australia during a previous trip. Most verbs were written in the present tense and there were some other mistakes that the students had to find on their own. The main objective was for the children to change the verbs written in the present tenses to the past tense and to identify some mistakes that I had included in which the verbs after did were written in the past form intead of the present form.

For the second activity, the students had to work in groups in a contest. Using the previous email, I gave them some sentences that worked as answers to Wh questions that they had to write and come up with on their own in teams. When they had formulated their questions, a person from each team had to go to the board and write their team’s question. Afterwards, the whole classroom would read each question from each team and we would find the winning team, adding them points.

Lastly, for the last activity, they had to work as a whole team. So instead of small groups, the whole class had to participate equally on writing their own email using the past tense and Wh questions. They all had to cooperate and give sentences that matched the sentence given by the previous classmate and I could help them link them. Sadly, we did not have enough time to work on this activity. Nevertheless, my teacher asked me to scan the activities to keep them and work with them some other day, since she enjoyed the lesson as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed being able to be in control of the lesson and I think that the students enjoyed the activities as well. I am looking forward to planning and giving the multimodal lesson in the near future, too.

Now I want to hear from you. What do you think about these activities? Would you have done them differently?

Best regards,

Mariana.