Reunited... Back to teaching!!

It was great to meet my students once again and be back to teaching. For the ice-breaker, we talked about Children’s Day, which was on May 5^th. I asked them each to write down three things they did that day. It did not come easy to them but they all managed it with some help from me. I got them to tell each other in pairs first before sharing with the whole class. However, this time, I asked them to pair up with the person sitting behind them instead. They always end up sitting in the same seats. Hence, every time we do a pair activity, they end up working with the same person. I wanted to see how they would interact with different partners instead.

When I went around to see how they were doing, right away I noticed that they were not writing in complete sentences. So, I reminded them to do so. Something else interesting happened during the ice-breaker activity. I had told them up front to raise their hand if they needed help with any words. So, I noticed that one of the students had that face. That face that definitely signaled signs of a problem. So, I asked him to describe to me what word he was trying to say in English. In fact, after all said and done, I realized that I did know that word in L1. However, my student didn’t know that and being a kind of fish he was trying to say, he didn’t know how to describe it to me either. Therefore, he used the dictionary function of his mobile phone to find out that the word he was looking for was “eel.” It was so cute when even after that he looked up at me to see if this was really correct… When it was time to share with the whole class, I instead asked them to report the three things the person sitting next to them (not the person whom they were partnered with) had done on Children’s Day. Immediately, the first student started with “I…” So, I said “I..?” Then he immediately rephrased his sentence replacing “I” appropriately with the name of his partner. I also suggested them to use sentence connectors such as “and”, “next” and “then.” The very next student to speak uttered the word “finally” while he was sharing. It was great to see that he had searched his lexicon and dug out yet another perfect word for this purpose. I took the opportunity to bring this word to others’ attention and made sure they knew what it meant.  

Next, we worked on recycling TLC. Last class, we had talked about describing movies and feeling words (positive and negative). This time, I presented them with the posters of three different genres of movies: Legally Blonde, The Green Mile and Alien vs. Predator. They were to try to describe what type of movie they had thought each was by using clues from the posters. Again, while they were working on this activity, I did my “rounds” to see how everything was going. Interestingly, I realized that they were mainly focused on linguistic clues. However, there was much they could have derived from the objects visible and colors in the posters. I guided them to try to use these clues as well. I guess they will never stop surprising me!! Once they were finished I wrote down all their contributions and brought up some other feeling words, which we had covered to see if they would remember what they meant. They could not remember two of them: “gripping” and “moving.” So I made use of suffix clues to explain as well as gestures and the whiteboard as additional MIC techniques. Later on, the word “distrust” came up as well. This time, I used prefix clues to explain the meaning of the word. I will continue to work towards teaching them how to breakdown the components of a word to guess the meaning as I believe that they could benefit much from it.

On the downside, during this activity, I could have gotten them to practice higher levels of cognitive thinking (Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create) go past Remember and Understand levels as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. I could have gone one step further during my comprehension checks and asked them to create a sentence of their own using the particular words at hand… But I didn’t… This is definitely something I need to work on.

Lastly, we started talking about gerunds and infinitives. I had planned two activities for them to work on. One was controlled mechanical practice in the form of a fill-in-the-blanks type worksheet. They worked on this in pairs. Hence, I gave them only one worksheet per pair to facilitate the process. The second activity was more contextualized. It was a type of bingo. They had to identify the correct gerund/infinitive forms needed to fill in the blanks. This time, they got to hear me say the sentences. As an additional MIC, I wrote these sentences down on the whiteboard. Once they identified the correct form needed, they would then put an “X” on the game board, if they had it. This would go on until one person said “bingo!” So, we had a winner. I had already told them that the winner would receive something small. However, what they didn’t know was that I had prepared a small gift for all for Children’s Day… :)

Next class, I will start incorporating pronunciation in a remedial fashion into the lesson. I have noticed that they all have problems pronouncing “-ed” endings as in “watched.” By using our readings on pronunciation (Kelly and Harmer) as a guide, I will come up with an activity aimed at teaching pronunciation. I have already asked them to bring a list of words they find difficult to pronounce to class next Sunday as well. I am so looking forward to it!! :)