SECOND PERIOD!!!! First Class: March 10th, 2011. Advanced group.

Hello people! I want to share with you my first experience teaching in the English advanced level…

This time I started with the lesson plan, so I had to teach the introduction of the unit and some vocabulary related with shopping.  The first thing I did was to introduce myself to the new group of students, and then I started my class with an activity in which they had to work in small groups. This activity did not take too much time because it was a matching activity in which they had to order the meanings with the corresponding words.  After every group finished, we checked the answers together, and almost all the students got the meaning of every word I provided, which was excellent because I was going to be using that vocabulary throughout my whole class.  

My second activity was based on cartoons pasted on the wall. I asked students to stand up and walk around the classroom in order to see the pictures and label them with any of the words we have studied earlier. I gave them 3 or 4 minutes to do this, and when they finished I asked them to tell me their guesses about the pictures, but at the same time they had to justify their answers and defend their personal point of view. It was a nice activity because I got most of the students speaking and interacting with others.

To make my class interesting, I brought some printed funny cartoons and I gave one to each student. What they did was to look carefully to the cartoon and find the joke. After that, they had to go to the front and share the joke with everybody, and the other students were allowed to ask questions to that person; for example: have you ever been in a situation like that? It was a great moment because they had a good time. My original plan was to get everybody in front of the class speaking and sharing their joke, but unfortunately, I did not pay attention to the time and when I noticed my time was already over and just half of the students did it.

At the beginning of my class I pasted a chat on the wall with the title: “New Vocabulary” and I put some markers next to it. I explained my students that the chart was for them to write every new word they did not know, and that at the end of my tutor´s class I was going to give them the meaning of the words. Just two words were written on it, and during my tutor´s class I make little charts explaining the words and I pasted them on the wall. At the end, my tutor gave some minutes to explain the vocabulary to the students. My tutor told me that she really liked this because it was an excellent way to teach new vocabulary.

I enjoyed this new experience because students were so clever and they did not need too much time to understand directions. I guess the only bad thing I can mention about this is that I got accustom to teach in the basic level, so I talked to much and my tutor teacher told me that in this level I needed to let them perform the activities by themselves. This is it… Thanks!