Week of May 4 Reflection

This week was test time, so I didn't have any classes this week. For my review, I reviewed the fourth lesson that I had with Grade 2.

The warm-up was my old staple: "What happens next?" I think the students enjoy this activity.  However, I didn't have the students make complete sentences like I should have. And it is really difficult to create a follow-up with the students.  But it's purpose is to create a fun atmosphere, and I think that it does it's job well.

For some reason, I was never able to quite get the Grade 2 lessons right.  The grammar points didn't always lend themselves to make a great basis for a lesson. For this lesson, the first point that was covered was "What does that mean?" For the presentation, I told a corny Konglish joke about a 5 year old onion being an "oh nyeon." This was to set up the phrase: "I'm smiling from ear to ear." I printed out a big smiling face on a big piece of paper, and asked "Really?" And, so that was my presentation for that point.

We did a listening activity and then a speaking activity. I did the speaking activity the wrong way. I presented the vocabulary before the listening activity, and had the students do both the book activity and the gap fill activity on the worksheet at the same time. In reality, I should have done the vocabulary last. The students do the book activity first, and then after listening to it the first time, I should have had them do the gap fill activity.

The class that I recorded was a lower level class. My co-teacher spent a couple of minutes translating the dialog into Korean. So, I don't know if doing some of the cultural context questions mentioned in ICC would have been helpful. I should definitely try it next week.

The speaking activity involved matching an English idiom with the correct meaning. This activity was an ill-conceived role-playing activity. The problem is that really the activity would have involved two students, and I didn't give any instructions for dialog.

The second half involved the second grammar point, "What would you like to do?" I did a quick introduction, and listening activity. I finished the lesson with a game incorporating this point. A student would draw the picture on the board, and then the other students would have to say, "I'd like to..." The students seemed to enjoy this activity the most. However, I did notice that the same 5 or 6 students would raise their hand to venture a guess. I need to find a way to expand this.

So, overall, during this lesson, the teacher talked quite a bit. I need to work on designing the speaking activities better, and maybe increase the number of speaking activities from 2 to 3.