Some lessons have been taught

Almost the mid point for me and the students are sitting their mid-term exams. This is fragmenting my timetable a little but it’s all part of the experience. Since my last post, I have taught a good many more lessons and I’ve recorded some highlights here.

My first active/passive lesson was not especially successful but with feedback from the teachers in the school, I was able to develop a much more effective lesson (for the observation) that I taught later in the week.

I actually enjoyed teaching countable/uncountable nouns to 1^st ESO today –the students were studying the vocabulary of food so to begin the lesson, I filled 2/3 of the board with their suggested vocabulary items (checking pronunciation, especially with cognates, along the way). Then I provided some sentences on the board with gaps to fill with some/a(n)/any which we completed as a whole class. I handed the chalk (and quite a lot of control) to one of the students so that the class could identify the countable nouns in our vocabulary bank. This was brilliant because it uncovered problems with yogurt and coffee and allowed us to explore countable cups but uncountable quantities of ground coffee! Armed with this conceptual understanding, the students attacked their student book grammar exercises with confidence leaving us to deal with ‘fruit’ in feedback since las frutas means that fruit is countable in Spanish.

My native speaker status has me delivering some mini lessons on pronunciation within lessons taught by the school-teachers. There’s nothing like a good tongue twister, making silly sounds and pulling silly faces to get a group of 30 teenagers to laugh with (at) you. Mind you, they laugh less when you point out that you want them to mimic the faces and sounds.

After the exams, the 2 Bach students are going to look at some poetry. They have a new teacher who has started this week and who wants to take them away from the relative safety of their textbooks and grammar exercises. This is a different approach to the ‘authentic materials’ lesson but the aim is to develop vocabulary and get the students thinking about, and manipulating, the language in ways new to them. Of course, as a former school English teacher I’m looking forward to sharing some literature with these students but also well aware of the challenges and potential pitfalls of upcoming lessons!