Entry 7: My Second Teaching

April 17th, 2014

Last week, one of the students said she read 9 books the previous day. We were really surprised at first but we learned that the books are online stories with pictures, so they are really short. There is a website called Bug Club which they need to pay for at the beginning of the semester. It has lots of books in its memory and the students can read as many as they want. The students told us that they really like reading short stories. That’s why we decided to do a reading lesson with a short story this time.

This time, I had a lesson with 4G. They are more motivated than the other class. By the way, I had written the “Today’s Plan” on the board at the beginning of the first teaching, which was something I learned from my mentor teacher last semester. 4C wrote it for us on the board but they wrote “Game” in each and every line, so they complained that there aren’t any games for this time and gave us a really hard time. Let’s move on with the lesson. I began the lesson with a vocabulary activity; just pictures and words. I think the pictures are quite clear for me but they couldn’t grasp the meanings of the words immediately when they saw the pictures. However, that was okay because they tried to guess some of them and it was more fun and effective. After their guesses, I explained the meanings clearly and I formed sample sentences. For the word “edge”, I said “I hit my head on the edge of table this morning.” And one of them said “Is it true? Did you really hit your head?” I was trying to think what I should say, because I didn’t hit my head. One of our instructors said “Don’t give an example of something if you didn’t really experience it. For example; when you introduce simple past tense, don’t say “I watched a movie last night” if you didn’t. At first, I didn’t quite understand the reason behind it but now it sounds so reasonable. You are going to share some of experiences with your students and build a relationship. We won’t just enter the class, teach and leave. They will never know for sure which one of our stories is true and some others are made up for teaching purposes and they will lose their trust on you.  Let’s go back to the problem I had in class. So when I was thinking what to say, one of the students said “Don’t be silly. Of course, it is an example.” Then, I was relieved and was able to say it is just an example. Why was I so concerned about this? I don’t know but when she asked if it is true, I felt like I lied to my students and I was exposed. 

For the reading part, I think I was so unlucky. Since they know the story from another course, it didn’t attract their attention. I tried to draw their attention with an origami crow which I made for this teaching. It kinda worked actually. However, I was planning to give the first half of the story to make them guess what is going to happen in the second half. This activity was also necessary for the post activity, because they will be making use of these ideas when they were writing an alternate ending. Since they knew the story they couldn’t generate ideas and I had to skip to the comprehension questions. When they were doing the exercises, they asked a lot of questions about the some words’ meanings. I wasn’t expecting them to ask “far”, “reach”, give up” because they know more complex words. I think it is coincidental to know those words and it changes according to contexts. Also, they asked “be able to” but I admit that it is my mistake. I should have seen that coming. After checking the answers, we were supposed to move on the post-reading activity which is “writing an alternate ending to the story”. I had to cancel that because they didn’t come up with any solutions and I realized that they still had troubles in pronouncing the words which were given in the beginning of the lesson. I decided to make them play a game called “Disappearing words”. For those who don’t know this game, let me tell you about it shortly.

1. Firstly, you write the words on the board or you can stick them to the board as I did.
2. You need to pronounce them and make the students repeat them a couple of times.
3. Then, you expect them to pronounce the words by themselves without your help. You need to do it randomly, without following the pattern on the board.
4. Then, you erase or take one of the words each time and make them repeat randomly until there is nothing left on the board.

Remember to draw a line instead of every word you erased/took because the students can get confused since they don’t know which word you point to. It was quite fun to play. They were more motivated than I expected. Sometimes, I forgot the words but they didn’t. They were truly fascinated by the activity. I enjoyed the lesson very much. I didn’t even notice the time, we used 2-3 minutes from the break time and the children didn’t care they wanted to continue, which was very encouraging for me. 

One last thing for this weekend… After my teaching, our mentor continued her lesson with “means of transportation”. She asked them how they travel. She wrote transportation on the board and wanted students to give examples. Some students said “hot air balloon, rocket, and sledge”. I was very surprised by their answers, especially “sledge”. When the time passed, the student who said sledge” asked the meaning of it. Then, I understood that she saw it in the book and didn’t know the word before. Then I got more surprised because she knew how to pronounce it even though she didn’t know the word. METU College students will never cease to amaze me.