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.