SECOND PERIOD!!!! First Class: August 31st, 2011...

Hello people here I am once again to tell you how was my first class of the second period… To start I want to say that it was a nightmare because I had to get up extremely early hahaha. 

I had some problems this week because my tutor teacher was sick, and he did not teach the day I was supposed to observe the class.  I called him in order to know what topic I had to teach, and the next day I got into the classroom without knowing my students at all. At the beginning it was difficult, but in some minutes I felt better because the students behaved in an excellent way toward my presence in the classroom.

The first thing I did was to introduce myself, and then I started with the warm-up activity. The students had to complete a table with their peers´ previous day schedule; for example, they had to ask questions such as: What were you doing yesterday at seven a.m.? What were you doing at 5 p.m.? After they finished asking, they had to complete the table and write sentences with the information their peers provided. I liked this activity because students loved it, and they were willing to participate all the time.

My second activity consisted of making students work in pairs and complete some sentences using the simple past or the past continuous. I provided the photocopies, and for my surprise, the students did it very quickly. They provided just right answers, so I moved fast to something else because that meant that they manage the topic completely.

Later on, I used some charts to explain some grammar structures for the use of Time Clauses, and when I finished, I gave each student an exercise for them to practice this grammar structure. They had some problems, but at the end they got the idea and could finish the exercise. At the end my tutor teacher told me that he really liked the grammar explanation because he never uses charts in his classes.

My final activity was a reading from the book. I implemented the PDP framework here, so as pre activity students had to complete an exercise containing the vocabulary related with the two stories. The second step was to divide the students into two teams and assign a story for each group; they had to read one story and match the vocabulary from the previous activity with the reading. After they finished reading and matching, I asked some students to switch from one team to another with the purpose of making them speak and tell their classmates about their story. The activity went well because students liked retelling the stories to their peers.

I guess it was everything I did in this class. At the end I received a good feedback, and even though this class was improvised my grade was acceptable.