Day 17

Day 2

Sorry it's taking me so long to update last week!

Today I taught two lessons, my third Important Book lesson and the oral English lesson. In the oral English lesson, we focused on getting the students to talk about the story we have been reading for the past few weeks, Ten Little Ducks. To review their comprehension of the story, I created a short worksheet where they match the selected vocabulary word from the story to its meaning and then, with their partner, select one word and illustrate it. Below the picture the students had lines where they were supposed to write a sentence describing the picture.

When I taught this lesson, it did not go as well as planned. I used "hands on top" a lot because they could not focus their attention for very long and that is a tool to remind them all eyes should be on me. In addition to using "hands on top" I taught them the difference between inside and outside voices, however this is a strategy I will need to teach again because I think they got overwhelmed with both techniques being used. Another strategy I used was calling on students who were raising their hands quietly to share words they remembered from our "what's in my bag" lesson yesterday.
What I need to work on improving is to model exactly how they should turn and talk with their neighbor instead of telling them who is going to be talking with whom. I forget that since this is a different situation, I need to remember they have never encountered many of the strategies students in the states may have. I will also need to work on guiding my students' talking with prompts and questions instead of just telling them to talk about a specific topic. After letting my students talk in pairs, I will need to learn how to bring everyone back to a whole group setting more smoothly. When the students were working on the assignment together, I went around the class and gave awards to the students who were behaving.. I have decided that instead of doing this at the end of the period, I will do it at the end of the day. My awards are not just stickers, but rather a small piece of paper that may say something like "WOW!" "You're doing great! Keep it up!" "Good Job! Next Time lets work on_____" I found this was a huge distraction for the students since they needed me to tell them what they said and then compare with their peers.

In my Important Book lesson, I brought in pictures of important things (police officer, school, and home) to lead a discussion of what IS 'important' before reading the book. My hope was that the images and discussion would help the students create a basis of the word before I read the story. In addition to using pictures, I also wrote 'important' on a word strip and put it on the chalk board for the students to refer back to whenever I read the word 'important'. In this lesson, I was pleased with how my students came to the floor. They were able to continue doing this in a slow and quiet fashion instead of everyone running to get a good seat. While I was reading the words, my cooperating teacher was sliding the book under the document camera so I could literally point to 'important' every time I said it, both on the page and on the chalkboard. After I read a page I would explain why the object I just read about is important and then I would prompt the students to read the line with me. By the end of the book the class was chanting the pages with me in a very rhythmic pace.

What I feel I need to work on include better instruction for the Thinking Pad and more concrete practice of what 'important' means. I chose to use a Thinking Pad because I thought this would be a good way for the students to practice actually writing their thoughts down, however, I forgot again that they have never done this before and so they didn't know what to do. Next time, I would model writing my thoughts on the pad and explaining what the Thinking Pad means. In the lesson I did write my thoughts on the chalkboard (this was when we were looking at what the three images have in common) but I think it may have helped them more if I wrote my thoughts directly on the Thinking Pad. On the other hand though, I am worried that by modeling any activity this way they won't learn what I want them to do but just copy exactly what I do. I think something else that contributes to that is their limited English. Hopefully I'll figure something out!

Overall both lessons were fairly successful seeing as I'm still learning how to teach this class effectively!