Almost the last one... Octuber 27th, 2011.

Today I taught the second class of the last period, and I’m so exited because I’m about to finish; just one class left.

I started this class with a warm-up activity called “Crazy chain story”. It consisted on making the students stand up and form a circle. I started the activity by inventing the beginning for the story, and then I asked one student to continue. She had to continue inventing part of the story, but the challenging matter was that she had to include into his narration a verb I had provided; for example: I provided the verb “open” and the student had to create at least one sentence using that verb in the past form; a sentence like: “And suddenly I opened the door.” And the activity continued until all the students had participated. 

This activity in particular was so useful because the target structure of the class was the correct use of the present perfect and the simple past. I really liked the activity because students were inventing some crazy and funny stories at the time they were having a good time and practicing the target structure.

Later on, I verbally explained the main use of the present perfect and simple past. During that I was providing a piece of paper containing a reading with some blanks in which the students had to use verbs either in present perfect or simple past. I asked the students to read the paragraph once and look for new vocabulary. When the students finished reading, I asked them to fill in the blanks, and fortunately they did it very well. The last step for this activity was to make the students read aloud in order to check their answers and pronunciation.

Some minutes later, I asked the students to work into two groups because I was going to play a song. I provided to the two teams some words that were part of the song´s lyrics, and I asked them to pick the words up as soon as they listened to them while the song was playing. After this, I asked the students to underline the sentences in which the singer used simple past and present perfect. The song I used was “Have you ever seen the rain?” and students really liked it because at the end they wanted to sing it.

For the last activity, I just provide some extra practice in which they had to form sentences using the two target structures; for that purpose I wrote some verbs on the board. I could not finish this activity because was over by that time, so I stopped teaching and my tutor teacher finished it… At the end I was satisfied because I got a good grade. 

Teaching with terrible weather conditions… October 12th, 2011

Today I taught the first class of the last period, and it was kind of interesting. When I woke up in the morning I did not want to go to the university because it was raining a lot, and I thought that the classes had been suspended, but they were not… So sad for me  L but anyway I got up, took a shower and got ready for the class.

I arrived at 07:05 in the classroom; some students were already there, but my tutor teacher was not. She arrived some minutes later, and I took advantage of that time to set up all the things I needed for the class.

I started the class by introducing myself to the students; fortunately almost all of them knew me already. I started the class with 15 students even though they were 23 in total.  

For the first activity (Warm-up activity) I asked the students to stand up and form a circle because we’re about to play a game named: “How good is your memory?” I started the activity by saying my name and something I could do, and then I threw a little ball to one student. That student had to repeat my name and my ability and then continue with her own. The other students had to remember the names and abilities of the previous students and repeat all of them by the time they got the ball. When one student did not remember one name or ability he/she had to sit down and the game started over again. I liked this activity because I could learn the students´ names as they were practicing the target structure which in this case was the different uses of can and some other English modals.

The second thing I did was to paste on the wall some charts containing the uses of can. I explained the grammar part of this modal, I provided some examples and finally I asked the students to work on an exercise that was on their handouts.

Later on, I continued explaining the use of “Have to and Don´t have to”. When I finished explaining and providing some examples, I ask the students to form two teams.  I provided some sentence strips for each group for them to form five sentences per group. Students did it very well as they got the idea easily.

The last modal I was supposed to teach was: “Should”. Once again I used some charts to explain the use and meaning of it. When I finished explaining, I gave to each student a piece of paper containing an exercise for the correct use of should. The last thing I did was to check students´ answers with the whole class.

When I finished, I stayed in the classroom to receive my feedback. At the end I received a nice feedback and a good grade, Thanks God…