A BIT OF ENGLISH ANY TIME

Class journal

Context about teaching:

Being natural, real, be relevant; create an atmosphere making things understandable for your students. Help them to discover valuable things from the knowledge they have. 

Be real, that means, for instance, playing with toy fruits to learn the names of the fruits. Realia means real things. Make whatever you are teaching as real as possible.

You are teaching a second language. You have to teach with your own body. Make yourself be understood. Our brain connects one person, one language, this is the reason we must to keep in mind: one language, one person. We need to be consistent to speak to them in the language, we can translate, we have to reward them: excellent, good guy, well done, etc.

We need to connect things with the culture. We have to use everything that we have at hand.

Coherence: teachers are doing things because of something.

Challenge: playing games and giving rewards to winners.

Arose curiosity: to create the necessity to learn more, to discover more.

Care: we need to care about our students.

 

Managing children positively:

1st Relationships: they should have a nice relationship; and you, as a person, need to have a good relationship with the students.

2nd Rules: they need to know what you are expecting from them. Also they can participate in the process of creating rules. You have to be consistent all the time with the kids. Making clear rules is what really helps.

3rd Rutines:  they feel relax with routines when they know what is going to happen.

4th Rights and responsibilities.

5th Respect: yourself and everybody.

6th Rewards: we have to value the effort that our students are doing. Every step forward that your students are doing we need to reward them.

We decide what we are going to do:

• What am I teaching?

• How will I teach it?

• Who am I teaching?

• How will I know if the students understand?

Prepare the language:

Use familiar signal for attention: wait for silent and attention.

Announce the general natural purpose of the activity.

Establish o create a context.

Divide the class: how you are doing that and the reasons. Depending on what are you going to do, they need to know why I do things.

Give clear instructions. Show clearly how to do it. For instance: dictations with colors. “Show me the red crayon and color the tomato”.  Step by step I control the situation. Depending on the activity have something to do, during the activity also. They have to do it themselves. Make sure they are doing it, but discreetly. Ask them when it’s done. Finish when they are enjoying it, that way they will like to do it.

Every class, teacher and child is different. Try to arrive to everyone and to arrive to all students.

 

Storytelling

A warming up activity: pre telling activities to focus on the story. When using a story:

Pre telling activities, while telling activities, post telling activities.

Warming up: without a teaching objective. Just to create an atmosphere, to stimulate and wake them up.

Pre-telling activities: words or expressions that they need to know before telling the story.

I have to do activities in order that my students could understand the story. Within the story we can teach (imagine there is a song).

Post-telling activities: to assess the knowledge they have gotten. In the school you can use the story through different days.

How should we tell stories?

When you teach a story you develop your own style. Gestures, emphasis, you have to use your whole body, look at the children. You will realize if they are understanding, modulating the voice, stress the voice. You can bring toys, real things. Ask the kids about the story (children, what is going to happen to...?) making them participating.

Teachers are clowns.  (Great example with the You Tube clip by Michael Rosen “We are going in a bear hunt)

When we teach we work different skills: listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the natural order for teaching in the class. When teaching you should have a bit of them. It’s more important to be fluent that to be accurate. You have to talk to them all the time. You can’t force speaking.

Pre-school: 80% listening, 20% speaking, reading 10%, writing 0%.

1st cycle: listening 70%, speaking 20%, reading 10%, writing 5%.

 

 Listening First

Before asking your students any kind of listening you have to create a context. Learners assume failure, we must trust in ourselves. We have to give confidence to our students. We will understand the main part of the text. In English we stress the words that are important in the text. We have to give a reason to listening.

Always give a task to your students before listening.