Journal week 3

Journal #3

To know if the students are really learning, I did a mini quiz where they had to complete the sentences with an adverb of frequency. The results really vary depending on the student, because each sentence was a daily routine. One student had breakfast at 7:00 a.m and another student had breakfast at 8:00 or a student always played video games or another student never played video games. The purpose of the quiz is for the students to put into practice what they have learned. One of the best ways to teach English is to teach within a social context. So I made the students in groups of 3 students, create a dialogue using the simple present, either through daily routines.

Students are not used to speaking in English, this is because the teacher does not focus on this skill but on grammar and vocabulary. Maybe the ability of speech has not been so important because the government does not evaluate it. I think students must learn to speak in English so they can create their own ideas or express ideas of others and most importantly to hold conversations with native and non-native speakers of English.

At the beginning it was not quite a success, because the students felt very limited vocabulary.

Journal week 2

Journal #2

The students already know the grammatical rules of the simple present. The advantage of they know the grammar rules is that they can already do sentences (affirmative, negative and interrogative) and they could even form sentences without knowing exactly the meaning of each word.

After the students learned to use the "simple present" tense, I wanted to teach them the adverbs of frequencies. For this topic, I did a pyramid in straw cardboard and then I divided this pyramid into 6 parts. In each part, I wrote an adverb of frequency (Always, usually, often, rarely, never). It was the best way to teach them because they could differentiate each adverb according to the size that was divided into the pyramid, for example, the end of the pyramid is the largest, so students identify it with the adverb "Always". So I understood that students also learn with drawings.

As the next item was the clock, I decided to do a clock and they also did one. To teach them to tell the time, they must first know the clock's parts. For example, the clock has 3 hands, the first-hand dials the hour, the second-hand dials the minute and the third-hand dials the seconds. This way of teaching helped me a lot in that the students understood the topics better. The error of a teacher is to teach the class without taking into account the "background" of the students because even some students do not know to tell the time in their own language, in this case in Spanish.

Journal week 1

Journal #1

Teaching is one of my passions because in it I can share my knowledge and experiences. When we want to work with a specific grade, the first thing we should do as teachers is to know the students and know what they want to learn and how they would like to learn. Some teachers think that being the grumpy and selfish teacher is good pedagogy for children; This way would only serve to maintain class control taking into account that students obey out of fear of the teacher. But where is the pedagogy? Will children learn English? In my lesson plan, I started with a greeting and a big smile. Then, I introduced myself and made them introduce themselves with their names and their expectations in the class.

Later, we made some agreements to fulfill them in all the time I will be with them. One of the agreements is the participation in class, fulfill the tasks and hand homework on time, be early in the classroom and good behavior in class, for my part, I will not be a grumpy teacher and be as flexible as I can with so that they learn. That exercise was very good because the students looked at me like "The good teacher" and I could notice the desire to want to learn more.

In the other classes, we did several activities in order to learn to use the simple present in everyday life (Topic that the students were seeing that week). It was a very nice experience and how a good stimulus can make them change their way of behaving in class and motivate them to work in class.