milestones

In the same way you get into the rhythm of making a controlled drop out of a plane, I think I'm getting into the rhythm of teaching.

Today was my (fourth? fifth?) class where I filled in for Amelia, who is on vacation. She and I didn't meet up beforehand to hammer out what I was to teach, so I look it all up upon arriving at the school an hour and a half before class. (Fear makes me punctual.) I found out that the students had a mid-term exam today, and so I would have to do review for the first 45 minutes of class, and then while the students took the test, I would be pulling them aside one at a time to do the oral portion.

All I gotta say is, I put on my big-girl pants and got to work. I hashed out a brief lesson plan that would review all the things the kids had learned up to that point (which wasn't that much, to be fair). However, I still made up most of the lesson on the fly. I hadn't decided on a warmer (a short, fun activity to start the class and get them moving around) but after giving the spelling test, I managed three minutes of Teacher Says (it's like Simon Says).

After that, we did a game where I drew a graph on the board and wrote pronouns and verb phrases ("she" in a box with "catch butterflies," for example) and had the kids throw a sticky-ball at the squares and then make sentences with the words. Each right answer got a point. I dragged that out for a bit by mixing up the sentences they had to make based on what grammatical structures I knew they had on the test; "Do/Does (pronoun) (verb phrase)?" "Can (pronoun) (verb phrase)?" "Does (pronoun) (verb phrase) every night/evening/morning/afternoon?" The basic structure of the game I'd already decided on, but the changing of the sentences I did on the fly.

I did have a small game planned after that, where each student got a stack of playing cards (all black or all red) and had to line them up on the ground as fast as they could. Then I asked them which one was "longer" or "shorter" and they had to say "The red one is shorter/longer," etc. The very fact that their lines were really messy amused them a lot. Then I had one student stand next to me and asked about "taller/shorter," and then "older/younger," which, as kids, they thought was hilarious.

Now here's the part where I, if you'll excuse the phrase, pulled a game out of my butt. I brought out the little beach ball we have in each classroom, and then I got out the sticky-ball, which is smaller than the beach ball. I asked one student, "Which ball do you like?"  (review question) and she said, "The big one." After that I asked a student, using playing cards, "Which card do you like?" and got "The red one." I did a question using black and blue markers, and during this five-second exchange I thought, "What the heck am I going to do with a beach ball and a playing card that gets them to practice English?" They were excited about the beach ball, so I kept that out. The playing card had "7" on it, so I put it on the dry erase board. Then I had the kids make a line of cards on the ground, as if we were going to play volleyball and the line was the "net."

I still didn't quite have a plan yet, but what I finally settled on was that one pair of kids had to pass the beach ball back and forth "7" times, while the other pair had to ask me "3" (I pulled out another playing card) questions using the vocab we'd used earlier. Whichever pair finished their task first got a point for their team.

I cannot believe this worked, and was relevant to the midterm. I know there's still a lot more I'll learn about being a teacher, and more milestones I'll hit the hard way (>____<) on the road to becoming an experienced teacher, but this was a big deal for me because I not only made this thing up, I did it on the fly, in class, and it was successful.

The kids all did very well on the oral portion of the exam, although they had some issues with adding "s" onto third-person verbs, aka "He takes a bath," "She does the dishes," on the written test. I think it may be because we (the teachers) like to do interactive activities because it's more fun for the kids (after all, they are on their summer break and some of them are spending 4-6 hours in English school a week), but I think it might be taking some time from their writing practice. <---- See, this is me thinking like a teacher. :) Ain't it cool?