Teaching Practice Part 2

Now it’s time I shared my impressions and discoveries from teaching 5th graders. To begin with, they are adorable! Their English is very poor, but they do their best to work hard. One thing I love and missed — sincere response, shiny eyes and innocent smiles.

• I accidentally came up with a character that would accompany our classes and it was a huge success. Our first topic was “prepositions of place” and I made a PP presentation with a little bee and a box. Kids named her Bee Maya and now she helps us every time. She went to New York, came home to do her household chores, then moved to another house and met a Lady bug to share her new address!

• I told my kids I was a witch. That’s why a have a magic hat with mysterious questions that we start our classes with. It’s a very nice way to warm up.
• The hat is not the only warming up activity. I try to come up with a different game every time. It’s not a problem thanks to my camp experience. For instance, on Tuesday we are going to play a game called “I’m going camping”, where you need to come up with an object that you will take with you, but it should start with the first letter of your name. And I use tongue twisters as well.
• Speaking about games, I opened Pandora’s box. I knew that children love playing, but in camp we play every day and at school it’s usually rare occasions. You can’t even imagine how happy they are when we play, even if it’s for the sake of studying. Last Thursday our topic was ‘household chores’ and in the end of the class we played simple ‘crocodile’ (when you need to show something and the others guess). My students couldn’t help smiling and it made me so fulfilled!
• Also I use a motivation system. Kids get coins if they work hard. And during the last class we will count all the coins and the first three with the biggest number will get prizes.
• Children love questionnaires. I gave them small pieces of papers with questions like ‘what is your favorite animated series?’, ‘what are your hobbies?’, ‘please, draw yourself’. Their answers are so cute! I’ll share them if you want to. And their replies helped me choose characters for some activities!

• And one thing I was worried about and which is not going very well — my accent. I try to say some basic words with the British accent so that they could understand, but it sounds terrible. I miss my ‘Rs’ and double schwas… I tried keeping my accent, but they didn’t understand some words.

In general, I’m very happy with everything. I give them activities that would be interesting for me and they like it!