Last day of demo teaching
8/23
Well, today was certainly interesting. Everyone yesterday couldn't stop talking about how Typhoon Tembin was going to hit, and people were so sure about the impending typhoon holiday that most of us just left after some perfunctory lesson planning. Lo and behold, Typhoon Tembin decided to linger in the Pacific for a while, traveling at a measly 9km/hr, and as a result, last night it didn't even rain in Kaohsiung! Needless to say, we all had to go to school this morning with minimal lesson planning done.
My co-teacher Angela and I had the first class of the day, and today we didn't even have a games and playtime period to act as buffer. We had briefly discussed what to do in case we had work, but neither of us had really written down or fleshed out our ideas. We quickly sketched out a more solid lesson plan in the ten minutes before class, and I think we did pretty well, considering (although I sure am glad we weren't being observed!).
We started out with a dialogue role-play, asking each other about our pet animals. That was a pretty good way to introduce our topic of the day, "Animals," but I feel we could have taken it a step further by getting the kids to do the dialogue in small groups or pairs. I'm sure the kids would have liked to talk about their pets, if they had any, and if they didn't, well, they could have practiced negation (e.g. "I do not have a pet"). Then, not only would the kids have been using language for an authentic purpose, but it would have been a more student-centered classroom.
We then moved on to an alphabet activity, where the class split into two groups. One group had to think of an animal for each of the first 12 letters of the alphabet, and the other had to think of animals for the last 14. At the end, each group earned points according to how many animals they could think of. The uneven splitting of the alphabet was accidental, but I think it worked out for the best, since it is pretty hard to think of animals whose names start with Q, U, and X. I mean, I as a native speaker couldn't even think of an animal whose name starts with X! I thought of umbrella cockatoo for U, but what beginner English learner is going to know that? The execution of the alphabet bestiary activity was a bit messy, since we didn't give the instructions very clearly (to be fair, I wasn't really sure what was going on myself; the activity was Angela's idea). We did find out what the kids knew already, i.e. very little, other than the two kids whose English levels were way higher... sigh. So maybe the activity in and of itself wasn't great, but it did segue into our next activity, which I made up on the spot out of desperation.
The last activity we did was a drawing activity. I gave all the kids markers and paper and told them to pick an animal and draw it, and write the animal's names on the bottom. "Fish" and "Octopus" were surprisingly popular. While it was a fun way to check if the kids had mapped form onto meaning, I feel we could have pushed them a bit more by assigning the animals instead of letting them choose. That way, they could have learned a new vocab word instead of sticking to old favorites like dog, cat, and apparently fish and octopus... Anyway, while the drawing activity was happening, I got to walk around and help kids individually, which was when I discovered that one of the kids, Alex (pseudonym), barely knew his letters! This is where the alphabet game from before came into play. It was still on the board, and I noticed that when I helped him write "giraffe" by spelling it aloud for him, he took an extremely long time to write each letter. This was because he was staring at the board, counting on his fingers to each letter, then copying down the symbol. At first I thought he was ignoring me, that's how long it took for him to find the G. Poor little guy, he was one of the youngest in the class, and apparently didn't have the advantage of going to a cram school for English. It must be so hard for 3rd grade English teachers to manage the gap between cram school and regular kids, once official English lessons start.
Anyway, after that, our class period was over! Lauren co-taught the following two periods, and she did a great job too. One of her co-teachers, Monica, worked the animal drawings into a different and very communicative activity. She cut out the drawings, attached them to headbands, and had the kids play a game with this dialogue:
A: What do you see? B: I see a lion. What do you see? A: I see a dog.
Each time a student acted this out successfully with another student, they could each sign each other's headbands, and at the end of ten minutes, the students with the most signatures won. What was really beautiful about this activity was that Monica turned the headbands into a commemorative gift, so that the kids could remember their newfound friends by reading the names written on their headbands. Aaawwww... I think I could write a whole blog post about how amazing Monica's teaching is.
Right before lunch, we had about 40 minutes where we were supposed to play games or read stories with the students. We planned three activities - Pictionary, Go Fish, and a goodbye ceremony. Pictionary, to my disappointment and surprise, fell flat. The kids weren't incredibly enthusiastic or competitive about it, and I think it might be because the game was foreign to them. They did like when we called teachers up to draw, though. I think they like when teachers have the opportunity to look silly. On the other hand, Go Fish was a game they had played before, albeit with poker cards. They liked that game a lot more, I think. I had printed out pictures of animals and cut them up for the purpose of the game, but one problem was that the printer paper was too thin, and endeavoring kids could stare at the back of a competitor's hand, or the top of the Go Fish pile, to figure out what to ask for. By an act of serendipity, I discovered tonight that the stationery store near our house sells blank decks of poker cards! So next time, we won't have this problem with cheaters, and shuffling will be a lot easier too!
The closing ceremony was pretty cute. The team with the most points got to choose presents from a bunch that Monica had brought in, like pencils, keychains, etc. I think she purposely brought one too many, because she gave the leftover present to James (pseudonym), a kid on the second place team whose English abilities were clearly superior to everyone else on his team. The giving of the last gift was accompanied by a sweet speech too, to let James know that we appreciated his high level. After that, each co-teacher came up to the front and gave each kid a lollipop, accompanied with a unique compliment (e.g. She made great efforts to improve, he cooperated well with his team, and so on). We had leftover lollipops, so Monica asked the kids to present their favorite co-teacher with a lollipop in return. I am so flattered that I got three! One from Alex, the kid I had helped with his giraffe - although I'm not sure he knew what was going on. The second was from Jim, a kid I had given a lollipop to while complimenting his art skills. I guess we are kindred spirits, since we both like to draw in class! And the last was from Carla, a girl that I had done a fair amount of individual out-of-class work with, because she was about as illiterate as Alex (Lauren claims her level was even lower). I really admired her attitude - even though she could barely read anything, she still tried to participate in class, she wrote down everything on the board for future reference, and she was willing to stay in during breaks to work with me. I hope she continues to nurture that attitude toward learning. I have to compliment another little girl too, Jessie, who was one of the youngest in the class, but still had a pretty good grasp of English due to cram school. She was pretty quiet a lot of time in class, and often had the cutest grumpy look on her face, but she always helped out her fellow classmates. During class, she sat next to Alex and whispered translations or answers to him to help him out. After class, she would come over to check out what Carla and I were doing, and help me out when my Chinese wasn't good enough to explain some new concept to Carla. They were all such sweet little kids. It's strange to think that I probably won't ever see them again - I would love to see how they progress.