THE LAST EXPERIENCE

Hello!! Dear classmates...

I want to share with you my last class and my last experience with this group.

 I had my last class on Friday. It was a very nice class in which I developed 3 activities in order to practice “the passive causative”.

I arrived on time to the classroom in order to prepare and organize the room for the class, I arranged the sits in a semi- circle shape because it was one of the good shapes for many the activities.

Then I did the warm up I developed the game called pass the ball (you already knew the procedure), but this time I did it in a different way because I divided the class in two groups, each group stent up over a desk and formed circles and in the middle of the circle there was a box with the pieces of paper that contained the penalties, and I used it as reviewed of the previous topic. For the rest it was the same I played the music students passed the ball and the person who got the ball had a penalty. The penalties were questions about the topic (passive causative) and different tasks they had to develop.

After that I developed to controlled practice in which they have to use the passive causative.

Activity #1:  filling the blanks activity in which they had to choose and complete a conversation using the verbs from a box.

Activity #2: scramble sentences activity, students had to look, find out and report (write) sentences about things the Santana’s family had done or things they are going to have done following the days of the Santana’s calendar.

To finish with the class I develop the last activity that was called “who’s the boss?” a speaking activity to practice the passive causative.

It consists in:

The teacher:

·         STEP 1 – Ask students for job titles that reflect authority. Who gives orders and gets things done? Give “department head” as one example. Other possibilities: supervisor, office manager, project manager, vice-president, director, owner, company president, program coordinator, executive chef, chief of staff, head designer. Create a list on one side of the board.

·         STEP 2 – Ask students to call out types of companies or places of work where a number of employees must be supervised each day and where many decisions get made on a daily basis. Suggestions: restaurant, clothing store, car factory, language school, advertising agency. Create a second list next to the list of job titles.

·         STEP 3 – Have students work in pairs. Assign them a place of work and ask them to choose a job title for themselves. They must write down a list of at 4-5 things they got done today. Each statement must use the passive causative.

·         STEP 4 – Have the same pairs use their statements to create a dialog in which one person is reporting to the other.

·         STEP 5 – Have students role play their dialogs for the class. The boss can be demanding or understanding.

I liked this activity because I involved all the students in the practice and it was very nice to see the pairs working together and also the class is more dynamic and meaningful. 

And that was all...

At the end, I said thanks for everything and goodbye.

These two semesters, we had many good and bad teaching experiences that let us many lessons that will help us to improve our teaching skills and at same time be better teachers every day. 

Thanks god we are almost the end of the career and that’s really nice… congratulations to everyone!!!

we did it…

SECOND CLASS THIRD PERIOD

 Second entry of the last period

Teacher: Walter Alvarenga

Level: advanced I 

Hello! everyone, I hope you are doing ok... this my second entry for this period and let me tell you that my second class was great even though we always have some problems, but you know problems  teach us some lessons and give us experience.

 First let me tell you that I arrived to the classroom on time, and this is what I did, I organized the sittings in a semi-circle shape, after that I started to prepare the material that I would use for the class.  And it is very good since you have time to prepare everything before the students come to classroom.

At the beginning of the class:

As a warm up I developed the game called: “the neighborhood gossip” that consists in:

·         PROMPTS: ·         Mr. Jones – his dog ·         Mrs. Greenwood – her son ·         The Smiths – their grandchildren ·         Doctor Woodson – his wife ·         Mrs. Woodson – her husband, the doctor ·         Mr. McCormick – the delivery men ·         The Hancocks – their sixteen-year-old daughter ·         Professor Ray – his ex-wife ·         Gwen Ray – her ex-husband, the professor

The teacher: Write the list of prompts on the board. Tell students to imagine living in the same neighborhood with all the people listed on the board. Each student must repeat all the gossip s/he has heard and share a new piece of gossip. Each piece of gossip must use a causative verb. In short, this is a memory game.

EXAMPLE:

·         Student A asks Student B (on the left): Have you heard about Mr. Jones?

·         Student B replies: No, what? / No, tell me.

·         Student A then shares the gossip: Mr. Jones let his dog eat all the flowers in Mrs. Greenwood’s garden.

·         Student B reacts: Oh my! Really? Etc.

·         The game continues until all students have had a turn to spread some Gossip. Allow previous speakers to help the current one to recall information if necessary.

I really liked this activity, but the problem with the game was that some students didn’t get the idea about the game because they didn’t know very well the structure that they had to use in the game  so that  they didn’t do it well, and I had to developed slowly in order to tried to involve all of them, another problem was that some students came late to the class and I couldn’t involve them in the game because they didn’t want to participate, for those inconveniences I spent a lot of time to develop it, and I didn’t have enough time to finish the explanations of the grammar notes about the causative verbs.

As I said before I didn’t have enough time so that I did the presentation of the topic a little bit quickly, I developed a listening exercise in the book (inside out book) of the topic “attraction” about the causative verbs and vocabulary.  It was good, but the problem was next, I had to explain all the grammar and there was not enough time to do it, and when I was explaining some students (girls) were talking and they didn't pay attention to the topic, so that I tried calling their attention, but they ignored me and they continued talking, they made me angry because they didn’t pay attention and then they asked me questions about the things that I had already explained before.  

One of advice that I can tell you is that we need be prepared for these kind of unexpected situation that we faced in the classroom; for example, the problem with the girls was that I got nervous and I didn't know what to do, but later I tried to calm down and I continued explaining to the other ones that were paying attention to me.  With the game, now I know that I had had to change the game immediately or I had had a plan B. (When an activity doesn’t work well as you planned)

I couldn’t finish explaining all the grammar because of the time, but for the rest everything was good...