Official 2
It was my second official
presentation. It was with first graders and the topic was toys. The lesson was
supposed to be a revision ; they have already learnt toys. I tried to use basicly technology in my lesson
and I prepared 4 powerpoint slides. They are young learners, so they want to
see things on board, otherwise they lose their attention very easily. I started
with pictures and asked questions based on that. Which toy is this? What color
is it? etc. Students love colorful
things and I prepared my lesson acording to that. This part was to remember
toys names and it had nothing to do with their properties. Then I showed them
another power point slides and it was a game. There were two sentences about
one picture projected on the board. Two students are standing in front of board
without looking at the picture and when I told them to look, they run and touch
the correct sentence about that particular picture. There are two sentences,
but one is wrong one is correct. The sentences can be about number of the toy
or the color or the size of it. I change the properties of them in order to
trigger their discrimination skills. This activity could have been done
bette,because I tried to do it like a pair work, but it did not work. One
student mah have the correct answer while the other do not have.And when she
see her friend going on the sentence, she immediately follows her peer without
thinking. This caused a little problem for me; I could not think of this
potential problem. Apart from that, I did not experience any problem about that
activity. When we want to look at the next activity, we work on a wroksheet and
it teaches has/have got. Students have some problems in where to use has or
have got. They cannot discriminate between the two and I tried to explain when
we have to use has or have got. More or less, I think, they understand. I tried
to explain it clearly and simply as much as I could. Then the last activity was
again a game and I think it was the most enyoyable one. I showed them puzzled
words on the board and asked them which toy it was. They easily fixed words and
found the toy and heard the applause in power point and loved it. Actually,
Miss Cansu- the real teacher- recommeded me to add such an effect because she
said they love it a lot. So, I did and it worked. Lastly, I made them listen to
a song. They wanted to dance with it. It was like a present for them and
signals the final. Overall, I am happy with that class. They did not cause me
trouble and I did not have problems with classroom management. They sat still,
but if I had not prepared that many activities, they would have been probably
got bored and would not follow the instructions. With young learners, I believe
that I should have so much options in my hand so that if one does not work, I
can use a another one.
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Official 3
It was my last official presentation
and it was with preparatory class. They were in high school. The class has 8
students and they are pre-intermediate. I was going to teach “Passive Voice” to
them and the structure was very new and unknown for them. I thought that they
knew the structure more or less from secondary school, but when I started
teaching, I realized that they knew nothing. I arranged lesson plan in
consideration to that point, but it was a huge mistake for me. I prepared an
introduction part that explains when and we use passive voice in English and
how to form it. I started the lesson with questions to prompt them. I asked
them : Do we a correspondence to passive voice in Turkish? And they did not
even know that. Then I asked whether they had heard “edilgen yapı” in Turkish,
only a few of them could answer it. At that point, I realized that things would
not go as I had designed and yes, this was the case. Anyway, I gave them a worksheet which explains
the structure simply but perfectly and we went over it. However, that
explanation was not very effective, because they could not catch the point. At
that point, I thought the whole lesson would be on explaining the structure
itself and all of the activities that I had prepared would be lost. I look at
the teacher, who was observing me and smiling at me, and then I shook myself
and changed my style and gave more examples fot them to understand the
structure more easily. I told them that they could feel relaxed and we were
learnining together , we could make mistakes and said to them when they did not
understand, they should feel free to ask me because the topic was very new to
us,so it was very normal at that point to make mistakes.Then they felt relaxed
a little bit and more participation occured. They told their opinions and where
they had problems. Now, things were going better. Here, I was happy to overcome
that obstacle, because students did not get the point but not because they did
not pay attention maybe because of the way I presented the structure. At that
point what was best thing to do, was to change my way and try a new technique
to explain it and see whether it worked or not. I did it and it worked. I
provided more examples and asked more questions and adviced to form sentences
together as a whole class. I realised that we lost about 8 to 10 minutes more
on explanation part, but it was not important. The aim of the lesson was to
make them learn the structure and form sentences by using passive voice and I
accomplished my goal. After I was sure that they got it more or less, I moved
onto exercise part to reinforce what they had got. I continued with a very easy
exercise to make them relaxed and confident about topic. I used power point
slide and sentences came and we formed passive sentences together. I looked at
their eyes to see whether they were okey with it or not and almost all of them
got it and seemed happy. Then, I gave a worksheet about famous people. They
were supposed to change active sentences into passive. While they were doing
it, I moved in the class to see whether they had any trouble and because the
class has only 8 students, I myself corrected their little mistakes and made
explanations, gave feedback why it was incorrect. I think, this was the most
effective part for me and also maybe for them, because providing feedback to
each and every student was beneficial for their progress. What I learnt from
this lesson is that classroom environment is always dynamic and you may be
forced to depart from lesson plan and change things according to your students.
As a teacher, you have to be fast, creative, and intelligent so that you can
wave a magic wand. J
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