Activities in the classroom

Hello everyone! Welcome again to my blog. 😀

We started by talking about our previous class, which was about lesson planning. It is important to know that a lesson plan can also look like an agenda and should have a main objective. 

We also talked about how to write an objective for lesson planning. Teaching and lesson planning require a lot of observation. Sometimes, when we teach how to teach, we realize that we may not set the best examples as teachers.

Then, we discussed about which activities we can do for some scenarios: .

* Activities to group people

Name tags can help group people together so that students can share with other students who are not their friends. We can also group people by their clothing color, their initial letter, etc. 

We can also use objects for students to pass around and when the song stops that person becomes part of a group, or use something like this magic hat to pick out name tags. 

* Activities to measure time 

To measure time, we can simply use an online stopwatch, play some music and stop it, counting numbers, etc. 

* Activities to promote participation

For this, we can also use objects. Teacher Orlando used 2 different objects and gave them to 2 students who were on different sides of the classroom. Then, he made sounds with the board so that they started to pass them to the others. When he stopped, the student with object 1 had to ask a question and the other student had to answer it. It was fun because of the excitement of passing it out in time. 

* Activities to make sounds for classroom dynamics 

The most common example is clapping for a specific amount of time for a specific objective during class. 

* Activities to wake students up when they're falling asleep.

We can randomly ask students a specific question about the topic to make sure they are paying attention. We can ask them to stand up and discuss the topic or what they learned in the previous class, etc.  

* Activities for praising students, etc.

For this, I consider that giving a compliment is essential, letting them know when they have done something well, congratulating them for small improvements, or if possible we can give them candy for answering something correctly, etc. 

At the end of the class, we sang happy birthday to Miriam, as it was her 23rd birthday. And teacher Orlando did another activity, in which he gave out the objects again and the person who got them had to say something good about Miriam. I was one of the chosen ones, but my nerves played a trick on me and I couldn't say many things, lol. 

So, that would be all for this entry. See you after vacations!

Lesson planning, CCQs & ICQs

 Hello teacher and everyone!

This week's class was different as it was virtual. In fact it reminded me of the pandemic times when all the activities were like this. So yes, I did miss attending face-to-face classes last week. However, our teacher is so dedicated to his work that he left us with several activities that I could not finish.😅

We studied about lesson planning and the importance of it. It is important to calculate the duration of the class, the steps to take, what activities to do according to the topic taught, otherwise we could fall into the error of improvising, which would lead us to a class without coherence. 

An important point that caught my attention was to anticipate the possible problems that students may face and to know how to solve them in case they arise. 

Then, we had to talk about this topic in a Vocaroo video and give our opinion. In my case, I could not do it on Thursday, but only until last Monday, with just a couple of hours left. 😅

Afterwards, we used another platform called Padlet Wall, where we answered a couple of questions, of which the first ones were a bit personal, so I answered them honestly, trusting that no one would have enough time to read it. In fact, I don't think I ever read anyone else's participation, I barely have enough time to make my participation. 😂

Lastly, we had a third activity to record another video. Unfortunately I was unable to complete it due to time constraints. But it was about ICQs and the CCQs. 

CCQ stands for Concept Checking Questions and ICQ stands for Instruction Checking Questions. 

English Didactic II

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first entry of this semester. I am so glad that teacher Orlando is still with us, as it would have been much harder to get used to another teacher, so I am excited to continue learning and putting my knowledge into practice. 

For our first class, we had a pop quiz, which I obviously wasn't prepared for😂, I only got 3 or 4 answers correct, and I didn't remember the rest. Here is a picture of it:

Sorry the paper looks like this😅, I thought we were supposed to participate only in the forum and that's why I didn't take pictures in the classroom either, but I will next time. 

We also reviewed how the syllabus and evaluations will be during this semester. We will start teaching soon and the most interesting thing is that we will have to bring students from outside the university who want to learn more; no matter their english level, sex, age, well they must be at least 18 y/o and they will have to go every Thursday and at the end they will receive a recognition. I really like the idea, I still don't know if I will bring someone but I am sure it will be great.

So, stay tuned for the next entry! See you.✌