My third and last entry of this period!

My last class with the intermediate group. As always I started the class by greeting them, and then I continued with the warm up. The name of the warm up was “sentence race” and as I had to continue teaching “the passive voice” I divided the class in two groups, and then I gave them a series of sentences in the active voice. They had to change the sentences from active to passive. After it, I was going to read the sentences. When they listened to the sentence they had gotten, they had to pass to the board and write the sentence into the passive voice to get a point.  The first student who finished to write the sentence in the right form got a point for their group. During the activity most of the students did it well, but I have some problems. One of the students did not want to participate and I did not know what to do in that moment so I continued with the activity. During the feedback, the teacher told me I had to encourage them to participate, and if the student did not want to participate I had to try with someone else. Another problem I had during this activity was that one of the markers, that the students were using to write the sentences, did not work well however the activity continued because the teacher lent me one of her markers. Then, I gave them a short paragraph but this time they had to change it from passive to active. As a final activity, they had to work in trios and create a radio bulletin using the passive voice. Every trio could choose from five different topics. After they finished to write the bulletin, I chose some of them to share it with whole the class. Finally, as this was my last class with them I thanked them because of his participation and because they were a really nice group.

My second class with the intermediate group!

My second class with the intermediate students was not what I expected. I could not finish on time and I had some problems with the material for the class, but at the end I can say that it was another experience added to my practice. As always I started the class by greeting the students. Then, I divided the class into two groups to work in the warm up activity. The last class they were studying “the passive voice” so during the activity I was going to read a sentence in “the active voice”. When finished to read the sentence one member per group was going to look for the right form of the structure in a series of sentences that were pasted randomly on the board. This task had to be done at the same time so the first one in getting the correct sentence had the point and so on until getting the last sentence on the board. In order to see if they had understood the passive voice structure during the last class and to make the activity a little more difficult, I added some sentences that were not in the correct form. At the beginning they did not realize it, but then they did it really well. After it, I could notice some of them still had problems with the structure so I made a short review and asked them some questions about the topic. Then they had more practice but I could not finish the last activity because of the time. To summarize, I can say that it was a nice class, and the only bad thing was that I continue having problems to set the time for every activity.

Intermediate

My first teaching experience this third period was with Intermediate students and I can say that I really enjoyed working with them because they were a really nice group. As an advice, the day before my class, the teacher told me to work with dynamic activities that involved students’ participation because the class was at 7 o´clock. The warm up was the first activity and it consisted in reorder some sentences that included “gerunds” and “infinitives”, and then paste it on the board in the correct order. After it, I introduced the topic about “gerunds” and “infinitives” and gave them some examples. In order to know if they had understood the topic, I asked them randomly some questions. Later, I brought a separate list of verbs that they could use only with “infinitives” or only with “gerunds” and with both of them. Then students had to create their own sentences using verbs of the list given. When they were working on it, I could notice they were having problems so at the time they shared the sentences with the whole class they have to tell me if the sentences where correct or not, and if they thought the sentences were not correct, they had to tell me why, and what was the right form of the sentence. By doing that they could help between each other. To conclude the class I asked them to make groups and get together to work in more practice.  I brought some markers and bond paper and every group had to choose a card that contained a series of verbs either to use with infinitives or with gerunds. After it, they had to write sentences and make a chart to then share them with the whole class. At the end some of them still presented problems with the pattern, but they helped each other during the feedback time of their task.