My third teaching practicum

It was February 20th and I had my last teaching practicum with my students from advanced English II. First of all, this day I started the class with a warm up activity called “red elbow” for which students were willing to perform it; however, I think that it becomes difficult when the rest of students are still arriving to the classroom because one has to explain again to them what the activity consists of, so it happened to me today and I wasted more minutes in this activity than I expected, hopefully I can say it is rewarding to know that my students liked the activity.

Secondly, during the beginning of the main focus of the class, I was checking with my students the exercises they had as homework and I could realize that some of them hadn’t done the homework yet, but they were helped by their classmates when I asked them to read their sentences. As I could notice during this part, students had some problems with the expressions they were supposed to include on the exercises, but I helped them out with the best answer. Later on, we moved to the next activity in which they had to complete a listening for details part in which they did a great job, too. After this, I had them working in pairs and discussing about some statements they had on their books, so they were asking me for some ways to say some expressions.

 Finally, I had them discussing with their partner one topic they wanted to talk about for the last part of the class, and while they were doing this they were asking me for some unknown words they found, so at the end I asked for volunteers to pass to the front to share the ideas that they had and some students passed to the front. Thank God everything worked well during my last teaching practicum with this group that provided me with a lot of knowledge to put into practice in further classes. 

My second teaching practicum 

Today, February 14^th 2017, I was teaching my second class. In this opportunity, I thought that everything was going to be better than the first time, yet I felt more nervous this time and I think it was because there were more students.

This day I prepared the warm up hot potato, but I only had few people when the teacher told me to start the class. I started the class with the students I had, and the rest of students were incorporating to the game as they were entering the classroom. I think that some students in this level feel ashamed when speaking in English. I could notice the problems they had when talking about something as they had some grammar mistakes.

As the class moved on, I continued with a brief review on the topic they had been studying for some days, so they could refresh their knowledge about it and it worked well because students still remembered the main points of the grammar part. I knew that students needed more practice on the relative clauses, so I brought for them a practice so that they could put into practice their previous knowledge. I could notice during this step that students were learning a lot because they did the exercises very fast and they didn’t make any mistake. In order to continue with the class, I asked students to work on their book and answer some statements that it had based on a writing activity. I could see that some of them had some ideas written on that part because they said they did it during their free time, but I waited until the rest of students had finished to start asking for ideas, and I continue noticing the problems they had when speaking, but I was helping them on what I could so that they could feel more confident.

At the end, the final activity was a debate in which they were ashamed again to start talking, so I decided to choose someone in order to start the ideas about the topic to be discussed, and I can say that after some minutes they got engaged with the activity as they were many volunteers when they wanted to share their ideas. In general, I think that everything worked well because my students participate every time I ask them to do it.

My first teaching practice

It was February 7^th  2017 and I was teaching my first class to advanced English II section “B”. At the beginning, I was nervous because I didn’t have idea about what way my class was going to take. As it was time to start the class, the teacher suggested me to start it with the students that were in the classroom in that moment; nevertheless, I told him that I needed more students to start the class. After at least the half of the students of the section arrived, I started the class. I can say it was nice to know how other people whom I just had shared some moments with, were going to respond to the class someone knew was about to start.

At the beginning of the class, everybody was paying attention, and I know that they liked the first activity I did which was “broken telephone”. For this activity, I decided to make two groups and even though some of them were cheating in order to pass the message, they enjoyed the game as some students were asking me to see again the proverbs they were writing on the board.

During the next activity, I felt worried because I was going to introduce the grammatical part; however, I tried to involve my students because it was necessary that they could understand the grammatical part of the topic I was teaching. After some minutes, I felt comfortable because I tried to clarify every doubt students could have at that moment. I can say that I tried to explain to them as clear and concise as I could in order to have them use the target language in the following activity.

 At the end, it was cool to have my students write and talk about a famous person because I noticed how engaged the rest of their classmates were when trying to guess who their classmates were talking about. In conclusion, I felt really nice to be there with a group of students that worked and behaved properly during my whole class.