First Week of Practice

In the teaching practicum course we have to put into practice the knowledge, and the theory that we have acquired, we are practicing on saturday's afternoon, from 1:20 P.M to 5:40 P.M. We were assigned to different teachers, who we have to work with, I was assigned to work with teacher Christian Torres, and to be honest I did not know who he was before the practice started, but the first day of the practice I met him, and he was very nice since the first moment. I am also working with my colleague Carlos Alvarado, that is a good future teacher, and I hope to learn a lot from both of them.

The class started by introducing us to the students, I felt confortable with them, the enviroment of the classroom is really nice. Then for warm up activity, teacher Christian played a game in order to review vocabulary from the previous class. The warm up consisted in: teacher select a student to pass to the front of the class to take a piece of paper which has written a phrase that they had to mimic to their classmates without saying any word. The rest of the class had to guess the word, or phrase. Then, teacher asked for volunteers to continue with the activity, and what is surprising was that students wanted to participate, teacher did not need to force anyone to participate, or make another activity to select participants. 

The class was from unit number 9 that is called "Fame" lesson from vocabulary "award shows". For encounter stage teacher show pictures to students, and he was asking them what they know about it. Students were describing pictures, and providing ideas about what they might mean. The purpose of this activity was to active the previous knowledge, making asociation of words. Students were excited about the activity because they were sharing what they know, students were participating a lot in this activity. Also, CCQ's were present at this stage. That activity was really good, because students were really excited about sharing their opinions, they were talking a lot, but was about the activity. For communicative purposes that was really usefull. I would like to do this activity with my future students, and something that I would change is just the size of the pictures, because teacher Christian had to be really near to studets in order to they can see the image. But in general the stage was developed in a good way, the activity was nice for teens, and he introduced the target vocabulary for the lesson, he also encouraged the students.

In the clarify stage teacher explained the definition of the vocabulary. Then, he pasted on the board the images of the encounter activity and he asked students to match the consept with the picture that correspond. As in the encounter stage, students were participating a lot, CCQ's were present in the stage, and they were really interested in the topic. Students were talking a lot, but that did not interfere with the class. Teacher could take advantage about this topic in this stage because students could talk about what they like. Students were talking about their favorite solo female/male artist, their favorite group, album, actor, actriz, etc. Students were excited about the topic. 

Then, for remember stage, students were asked to talk to 4 different people in the classroom using the new vocabulary in a sentence. The activity was a good idea to make them talk, and how it was about a topic that they really like. Teacher take us in consideration, and he asked us to help him monitoring the students.Then, students were asked to share their sentences with the complete class. they were participating in every single activity. The activities that were developed in every single stage was working for comunicative purposes. 

Practice vocabulary and concepts was part of the remember stage. Students had to work in pairs in exercices number 1,2 and 3, they had to match the vocabulary with some pictures. In excercise number 3 they had to read the question that was presented in the book, and they were written incorrectly and they have to say it in the correct form. 

There was no fluent use. It was the first part of the lesson, students had a break of 20 minutes. 

After the break, we started the second part of the lesson that was focussed on listenning and conversation, combining both skills. First, teacher provided instructions, students need to listen and read the audio number 1 from unit 9. Pre-listening stage, the audio was played two times, and it was about answer general information (Gist) checking listening comprehension, and teacher was asking questions like: What did you understand from the audio? then, students clarify the information about what the audio was saying.

For during-listening stage students were asked to work in exercise number 2: "circle the correct word", they had to listen for details, and identify which word was the correct in each sentence, it was an activity that took in consideration the skeletal outline listening for details. But, there were two activities in during stage, also, teacher asked to studets to work in exercise number 3 "Talking about past and present favorites" in which they hhave to put the dialogues in the correct order. That exercise also worked to introduce the grammar part from "used to".

For the grammar part of the class, teacher presented a video about a ranking of popular songs of the year from Vevo, obviously, students were excited because the video was about the music that they liked, teacher take in consideration their likes, and that is the reason why the activity was working properly. Then, teacher started asking them if they were agree with the ranking, or what they would change from the ranking, changing possitions. Students were participating a lot, asking and answering questions about the video, and giving their opinion about it. Then, teacher Christian started to introduce the grammar part of the lesson trying to active the previous knowledge of students by asking them questions about the use of "usted to", and students were familiar with the topic, they asnwered the questions and they were participating to answer what the function of "used to" is. Then teacher gave a short explanation of the use, and the grammar from general to specific in the clarify stage. 

Then, students had to take a test, and they went to the laboratory to take it. We were helping teacher Christian to monitory the students while taking the quizz. When we came back to the classroom it was almost time to finish the day of class, and teacher just gave them the grades of a previous evaluation.

My first day in the practice was great! I really enjoyed be there, and I was anxious to continue working with teens, and also I had something to plan for next saturdar. I had to plan a warm up activity for the class, and that would be a good idea to interact more with the students. I have learned important things about teaching to adolescents, I realized about their behavior in classes, and how important it is to take in consideration their likes to plan a class.