Reflection on lessons 3-5
Lesson 3. Lekcja pokazowa języka angielskiego w Dobrej Szkole
Place: Dobra Szkoła, Rataje
Setting: school classroom
Students age: 5-6th grade
Topic: Emotions
Other: an English demonstration lesson with the use of an interactive board
Link to the lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ8AfM58j8c
This English lesson is conducted with a use of interactive board, which I believe was the main goal of the lesson. How can an English teacher make use of interactive board during the lesson? In this video the teacher tries to demonstrate it.
The lesson starts with the teacher making students to drill two verbs “write” and “draw”. I suppose because further during the lesson the students will write and draw a lot on the board, so they should know these words. Then the students watch the video on emotions topic. The video is short and interactive, showing emojis with their names and serving as a lead-in.
But how do we express emotions? Right, with moving eyebrows ot with a smile on the lips. Thus, the next step was to teach the students vocabulary related to the parts of the face. The teacher uses TPR method; he repeats the words “eyebrow”, “mouth”, “eyes” and asks students to repeat and touch their faces. This moment looks strange to me because at this age students probably know the parts of the face in English, so they look confused and don’t quite understand the goal of repetations and it takes them a while to start to do it. If I assume the opposite, that they don’t know the words, and the confusion comes from hearing the words for the first time, then it is obvious that the amount of repetitions is not enough.
For the next activity students come to the board and drag the facial expression to the corresponding emotion picture. I like how the teacher calls for the students. First, he asked one student to roll the dice on the board and stop it. The dice showed nymber 4. Students were sitting in the line and the teacher asked the 4th student to come to the board and do the exercise.
The next part of the lesson surprised me (and I believe the students) the most. The teacher asked the students to close their eyes and gave them chocolate! After students tried it and shared with other teachers sitting in the back of the classroom the lesson continued. I didn’t understand if it was as a reward for completing the exercise or just an act of generosity from the teacher :) However, it changed the atmosphere in the classroom and….students started to speak Polish :) Although, later when the students were learning the word “heartbroken”, the chocolate played a good role! The teacher showed there was no chocolate left, pretended being sad and this is how he covered the meaning of “heartbroken” :)
Overall, despite some confusion I liked this lesson very much! I find the teacher creative and nice.
Lesson 4. CLIL Math Lesson Observation June 2019 Pt 1
Place: Dongshan High School, Taiwan
Setting: school classroom
Students age: 6-7th grade
Topic: Data collection in the form of tally chart and data presentation
Link to the lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCN0PP6BZJQ
The lesson begins with the teacher asking students what they like to do at a night market. Once students gave their answers the teacher led them to the topic of the lesson making students to choose between two types of activities. “Which do you like, A or B?” - students chorally read the topic and wrote it down to their notebooks as the teacher asked them. This is the first thing that surprised me, any word or sentence appearing on the board would be immediately chorally read and written down. In addition, the teacher pointed to the picture of the owl named WALT on a magnet board and a phrase written next to it “How to collect and present data”. This ritual was new to me but not to the students, because they chanted chorally “We Are Learning Today…how to collect and present data”. Then I realized the owl’s name was the acronym (WALT) and every lesson the teacher would write a new goal next to it. Needless to say, students wrote the goal to their notebooks. Honestly, it looked like many times given perfomance (which I understand any teacher can gain by practising some rituals every day) and amazed me from the point that I’ve never seen such order and discipline in the classroom (including my own experience of being a student in traditional school system). The teacher was British but he spoke Chinese, so the goal appeared in Chinese on the board. Later the teacher would often ask for a Chinese translation of English words to check the understanding of meaning. Another character stuck to the board was a monkey WILF (What I’m Looking For today) which said “Speak English when collecting the data. Draw a bar chat to show it” - same writing/announcing ritual was done to this phrase.
During the main phase of the lesson, the teacher would show what a tally chart is and explained how it works asking the students “Which do you like, bubble tea or guava juice? Maybe either? Or neither?” and scoring the answers with a chart. He checked the student’s comprehension of “either” and “neither” asking for translation. Next thing was learning different types of meat (ham, fish, beef, pork) and vegetables (carrots, potatoes, peppers). One student was asked to connect the pictures to the corresponding words on the interactive board followed up by chorall drill of each word and substitution drill “Which do you like … or …?” (the teacher would point at two pictures every time). I believe with such amazing organization the students could foresee the next task. Teacher’s assistant gave students the handouts with the two tally charts on them: one for “Which do you like”- vegetables question and another chart for the question about meat types. For 10 minutes students were mingling in the classroom, talking to each other and collecting data. The excerpt of the lesson finishes on students taking back their places and the teacher starting to present how to draw a good bar chart.
To sum up, I absolutely loved this lesson and the classroom management. It definitely was a remarkably productive lesson.
Lesson 5. Pre-teaching Vocabulary - International TEFL Academy
Setting: language school classroom
Students age:imaginary students
Topic: a selected by teacher set of words
Other: a demonstration of pre-teaching vocabulary inductively
Link to the lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hieVkcTJZd8&t=14s
In this video, TEFL Academy Instructor Wayne Walker conducts a part of the lesson where he teaches vocabulary. There are no students in the classroom but he performs so incredibly well that I have no doubt he possesses classroom management skills.
Wayne Walker starts the lesson with choosing 4-8 words from the reading passage he uses for this class. As a second step he elicits the words, showing pictures, miming, using realia. He suggests to give students a hint (for example, the first letter of the word) if they’ve heard the word but experience difficulties recalling it.
The third stage is to repeat the words many times. The teacher demonstrates individual and choral repetition. He puts his hand next to his ear to avoid using mother tongue but at the same time to give students a signal that they should repeat. The fourth step is to ask concept check question. I like the variety of questions the teacher comes up with. For example, for the word “notice”: “Do you notice anything different about me today? Yes, I shaved, thank you for noticing that”, “Do you notice anything different about the room today? Good, yes, we moved some of the chairs and you noticed that”. Have you noticed how the teacher would not only ask but also would often repeat the word? :)Steps five and six are writing words on board (the teacher may use different colors) and repeat steps 1-5.
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