'Walkin' on Sunshine'

Friday 25^th, November, 2011

I am really happy with how today’s lessons went. As usual today being Friday meant that I taught four of my grade 3 classes. The lesson I gave was the second half of the lesson I started last week. (I wrote assignment number two about last week’s classes).

To start with I briefly reviewed last week’s material which essentially consisted of the preview and presentation stages. To my eternal gratification they actually seemed to have remembered quite a lot about the presentation I gave last week. I was floored. Every class exhibited a decent amount of recall. Again I think today’s lesson flowed so smoothly because it was based on the solid foundation of last week’s lesson. I had been concerned that the week long gap between the preview / presentation stages of the lesson and the isolate, practice, produce sections this week would be a problem. I thought they would forget everything and I would have to start from scratch but this did not prove to be the case.

Anyway, the lesson itself consisted of one of Harmer’s teaching grammar lessons from a class handout we were given in week 10. The lesson was called ‘Girl’s Night Out’ and I adapted and added to it for my lesson. I have to say it all worked surprisingly well. The students, for the most part, engaged with all the different parts and went diligently about completing the different sections of the handout. However, I’m not sure I can identify exactly what it was about this lesson that engaged them so much whereas other similar lessons have failed. Was it really the schema from last week?

Regardless the students actually, again mostly, worked with their partners and there were very few cases of any students not participating. Whilst the lesson TLC was known to them (past simple irregular verbs) the language used throughout the lesson examples was definitely L+1 at least; maybe more in some instances. This actually seemed to spur them on. They were interested by the content and had questions to ask and comments to make.

Furthermore, this lesson required very little teacher talk from me! I could not believe it. I set up each of the activities and off they went. I spent most of the lesson going around the class whilst students were working and helping individual students (or pairs of students). This is truly a result worth celebrating. If I could give lessons like this all the time I would not be so shattered by the time I finish work.

However, there were some problems; the class did not progress through the activities at the same pace – some raced ahead while others lagged behind; and again my timing is really a problem. We didn’t get to the final activity which is the main production activity. So this means the material I thought I would cover in one lesson could not be covered in two lessons. I need to find a way to make more compact lessons.

Overall, I am very happy with today’s lessons.