SEVENTH TASK: mapping, informing, contesting, appraising and acting

Journal Entry 1

This class was carried out with 35 students from sixth grade. The class was after the break, so when I entered to the classroom they were very excited, talkative and a little bit dirty and sweaty because they were playing. However, as soon as I get the classroom most of them received me showing what they have taken. The class before I asked them to take a fruit or something related to food. So, despite they were very talkative and they were not sat on the correspondent places I was happy to see that they were expectant to the class. I started the class by asking them to present the food, I gave them an example like “this is rice. The rice is white. I like eating rice”. Then, they had to adapt the example according to their food and practice it with a partner. As the class before I had worked with them some vocabulary related to food, it was easy for most of them to follow the exercise. However, while I was checking the exercise with some pairs, some students broke an egg on a classmate’s desk doing disorder and distracting the whole class. They are four students who constantly misbehave and interrupt their classmates’ work. So, I had to stop the class while they cleaned themselves, the desk and the floor. This made me to lose about 10-15 minutes of the class which is much time taking into account the number of students in an oral exercise like this. At the end of the class, I just could check the development of the middle of them. Although most of them were worried about their pronunciation, they did their best.

From this class, I can say that compared to other classes after the break, this time it was easy to start it because students were playing attention to my instructions and how they were going to use the food they have taken. I highlight the fact that even those students who never participate in class, they dared to talk and say something in English. This made me feel it was a good activity form them. However, when I ask them to take food I never imagined that it could have any problem like with the eggs. My intention was to make them learn using real elements that called their attention.

Also, I could confirm that most of the time we do not prevent some situations than can occurred in the classroom and even more we are not prepared to face them up. Then, from this class I will bear in mind aspects like this when designing and planning my classes. Especially I have to be careful when designing an oral activity since it is important to see and revise what all students do.  

Journal Entry 2

Today’s class was carried out from 7:30 to 8:20 in the morning. There were 32 students from seventh grade. I started the class with a game, using a ball. This activity was done with the purpose of starting the class in a fun way and also to review the “WH questions” as I asked them different questions like “who is your best friend?”, “What is your favorite singer?” and so forth. I wrote some questions on the board and asked the students to answer them individually. After they had answered the questions, we played pass pass stop. The students who had the ball had to answer one question from the board and in that way we continued with the game until the questions from the board were answered by the students. During the time they were working individually I could notice that most of them were really concentrated on the activity, they were really engaged as every time they answered a question they asked me if it was right or not. After this individual activity, students gathered in groups and asked each other the same questions.

From this class I got the feeling that students enjoyed the activities, they seemed interested and happy to interact with each other. They loved working together. I could see they helped each other. Although they were laughing about some classmates’ pronunciation they were very respectful what made this class nice for all of them.

I can say these type of activities that involves games called student’s attention and make them feel comfortable in class. I have to say that in this case, students’ behavior helped me to have a good class too, but the point here is that all groups do not behave in the same way. So I have to think how to use this type of activities with a different group (misbehave) without losing control.