Class observation 04.02.13

Yesterday afternoon I came to school to put in practice some games with year 3 students. The games didn't take the whole session so I could observe how my tutor acted in class, which was her methodology, the activities she proposed, how she dealt with kids, etc.

My tutor has a traditional style of teaching and she follows the book structure to create activities but it doesn't mean she is a bad teacher or that kids don't learn English. As I could observe, she always prepares extra activities apart from the ones in the book and children like to do these kind of exercises. For example, I have seen two similar tasks in different classes which consist in describing pictures or drawings. In year 3, students drew a wizard and a castle and then, they talked about them in front of their classmates. Thanks to this activity, kids learn and consolidate new vocabulary as broomstick, hat, cape, tower, flag, etc. and they did it in a different way. With this methodology students felt also very proud of their crafts and they made an effort to do their best drawing a painting beautiful wizards and castles. Apart from describing the drawings in an oral way, they also wrote some sentences, so they practiced grammar as well. For example, kids used the structure "It has..." + the new vocabulary they learnt. I could observe the same kind of exercise in year 4 but in this case, children wrote their descriptions about their favourite animals. 

It should be also pointed out that the teacher decided to show all of the kids' writings in the corridor so the rest of the students could observe them and check how hard they had worked. Here you have the children's creations:

Today I have been observing a year 4 lesson. First of all, kids have corrected their homework about food and drinks. For correcting the activities we use the digital board because Surprise! book has a very useful resource to correct homework in an interactive way. Then, my tutor has told the story of a witch with the help of some flashcards. Although the story was in the class book and she could just turn on the audio, the teacher has decided to interact with kids and use her voice to tell the story. While she was talking about the witch she had asked some questions to students in order to improve their comprehension about the story line. I think that this is a perfect way of catching the kids' attention and also to ensure they assimilate the aims we had planned. After listening to the story, children have done an exercise of the activity book but before doing it in their books, they have solved it in the digital board. Kids love movement so it's a good idea to make them come to the board a write on it. This task is also positive to facilitate all the students the view of the correct answers.