English Access last entry!

Hello again dear bloggers!! I hope everything is going on well with you. I’ll be brief this last time. I was teaching in the English Access program. My last class there was on Monday 12^th. The class was divided into 4 principal parts. The warm up. A reading activity. A speaking activity (Group work) and, finally, a “find someone who” activity. All of them about modals which was the target language.

The warm up

In this class, I developed the popular “rabbit wall and arrow” warm up. It was just to set the mood of the class and give a little bit more time for the late comers. I saw the students felt better and had fun when doing it.

Reading

The main objective of it was to identify and underline the modals. Before developing that, I showed these images to the class so that they started using the modals. “He might be sad; they must be angry” and so on.

 It worked very well under my view point. To finish this, I elicited some of the students’ responses and I read along with the class in case that there were new words or a problem with pronunciation.  

Discussion (speaking activity, group work)

This activity was successfully achieved. In groups of 4, they discussed questions about real-life situations. Questions such as: “Should marijuana be legalized? What must you do in your country to obtain a driver’s license” among others. In this way, I think the students practiced consciously and unconsciously the modals. Plus, it was a thought provoking activity. To close this, I elicited some responses to see what they thought about and to see if they used the modals for sure.

“Find someone who”

This is a popular and common activity. I noticed that the students enjoyed this as it contained interesting questions. This was for using the modal “can” only. To close this, again, I elicited some of the students’ responses.

The class was very good, I think. However, one of the things that went wrong was the fact that not all the students were there. Also, I forgot to write the objective thought I did it in the middle of the class. Then, I think that I did maybe not a great job but a good one.

2nd English Access Class (Great experience)

Hello everybody! I hope everything is fine with you all. Sorry for the delay of this second entry, but there were some inconvenients and I could not teach before.  

To start, I can say that I was sort of tired that day (Friday 9^th) it was a very busy day; however, when being there in the class with the students I forgot all those stuff. I started the class like 3 minutes later. I greeted my students and asked them how everything was to which everybody said “fine” and “nice”; after that, I encouraged the class to participate in the session by saying that the class was going to be a nice experience. Later on, I started with a warm up called “Emotional Mirror”. Here I leave you what this consists on in case you want to put it in practice:  players in pairs, facing each other. One starts talking in gibberish, with a specific emotion (angry, happy, in love, you name it). The other instantly copies the emotion of the first player, and speaks in his own gibberish. No need to try and copy the other player`s gibberish, and both players keep talking, no pausing allowed. After about 10 seconds, the second player changes emotion, and the first one immediately follows her. I saw that my students really enjoyed this activity. They had a lot of fun and that was a great beginning for the class.

Afterwards, I started the class by showing a collage which contained many images of actors and singers who at the same are also actors. I asked the class to tell me who of the actors they knew. They knew some of them, so they started to remember some movies and share some opinions about them, and that was the idea as the class was going to be developed about vocabulary related to movies. It was a great and thought-provoking way to begin with the first activity. The first activity was a series of questions. It was a discussion, so I asked the class to work in pairs.

These are the questions I gave to them.

Honestly, I noticed that my students were working with motivation and were discussing the questions excitedly. After some minutes, I elicited some responses in general so that some of them could share their ideas with the wholes classroom. I did that to close the activity.

The next activity was a conversation about movies which contains some phrasal verbs. I put my students to read the conversation; boys and girls participated, so everyone were included. Afterwards, I clarified the meaning of some of the words they found there. I gave examples and the meaning of some of them. A good way to clarify the meaning of the words is to say the opposite such as: “succeed” “failure” and so on, and, it was with that activity that I finished the class.  

What went wrong? When giving me feedback the teacher told me some of the aspects that I could improve; the classroom arrangement is one of those aspects. Also, my concern about the time that I had, and the necessity of having an objective. Even though he told me the things that I could had done better, he also told me the positives aspects too, and that is great. So, generally I can say that it was one of the classes that I have liked and enjoyed the most because I know that my students enjoyed it as much as I did as well. I hope to keep improving and doing my best and hope you all guys too. Any comment, suggestion or recommendation regarding the class is welcomed guys.

By the way people, I owe you the pictures again ;( ... hopefully, I upload images for the next time.. Blessings!!