"Teaching Children EFL"

Introduction

 

Teaching Practicum I is designed to teach us how to make lesson plans and perform them when teaching EFL to children. Students coursing this subject performed five classes as a practice with children from 4 to 8 years old. This blog presents a journal with the fact information about each taught lesson (students’ name, topic, date of the lesson) explaining the experiences we had in each class and the ideas or techniques our classmates used, it also has the opinion of what activity we liked the most of each given class and an analysis of our own lesson.

1st Lesson

This was the first class our classmates performed on July 13th, 2012, by Magaly, Mauricio, Carlos. The topic that they had to teach was the numbers from 1 to 10. They were very anxious of seeing what they would do, and the children's reaction. We really liked the warm up they did called “the hidden name” in which a child said a number and the teacher chose and checked in the back of the name tag if that was the name of the child or not.  If the children guessed his or her name the teacher gave the tag to him or her.  This activity helped to activate student`s schema; we all realized that all of them know the numbers and therefore they were able to choose one number by saying it. It also helped as an ice-breaking because students started to participate. Even if the name tag they chose had the wrong name they identify which child the name tag belonged and said it loud by pointing the child.

 

2nd Lesson

 

The second lesson was taught on July 20th,2012, by Iris, Juan, and Gabriel. The topic that they had to teach was "The colors". This lesson was great because of the use of different materials and activities; but the activity that most called our attention was the one that Iris made in the practice stage, which consisted in giving students some little colorful hands made of foami pasted on a stick and having them raising the correct one when the teacher mentions a color. We think that this activity was very creative because of the possitive effect that had on students, and also we could abserved the progress of students specially the progress of Hector, the 4 year-old child who was seen for the first time interested in participating in an activity; however he start doing what the other children were doing, then he continue doing the activity by himself showing his knowledge of some of the colors in English.

 

 

3rd Lesson

 

 

The third lesson was taught on July 27th, 2012, by Fátima, Lilian, Karla, and Pilar. The topic that they had to teach was "The fruits". This was also another great lesson because of the way that the teachers developed it from the beginig to the end. Moreover, In this lesson we started looking at the use of realia in classroom which can be very useful to teach effectively EFL to children, that is why the activity that most called our attention was te one made by Fatima. The activity consited in having students sitting in front of the class with their eyes covered, then the teacher had to take a real fruit and asked to the student to touch the fruit and guess its name and color. We believe that this activity was very innovative and effective, because we could see the possitive effect that this had on students when they could easily guess the correct answer by using their tactile sense. Finally, the progress that we could observe was that the majority of students were able to identify easily the colors of the fruits, and also they were not using Spanish at all even when they were learning a new vocabulary they did not use words in Spanish.

 

4th Lesson

The fourth class was taught on August 10th, 2012 by Marlene, Konny, Orlando, and Isaac . The topic that they had to teach was "The animals". We really enjoyed this class; it seems that every time each group performed one, the next improved it more. We could observe how students have used their input to do well in this class.  We liked all the activities, but the activity we liked the most, was the one Orlando’s performed where students toured the farm. He asked them to made pairs and then he had students to walk around and stop at each animal to say the name and color of it. Nevertheless, not only Orlando participates but all of them did making more interesting the activity. As this was the fourth class, the children showed what they have learned about colors, fruits, and numbers. Hector the youngest child could answer correctly when he participated in pasting an animal with the right shadow; showing how he had improved from the first class where he did not pay attention or participates.

 

5th Lesson

 

 

 The fifth and last lesson was taught on August 17th, 2012 by Josué, Heynar, Andrés, and Ronald. The topic that they had to teach was "Clothing and accesories". The first thing that we noticed in this lesson was the number of students who were only two at the begining and then three; however the teachers could handles this and they developed their lesson without any problem. Something that really called our attention was the activity where students had to dress up some fruits, this consisted in that students had to take some clothes and accesories made of paper and paste them on each fruit. This activity was interesting and motivating for them, because both students were interested to participate and at the same time was useful for them because the teacher was asking them to repeat the name of the clothe or accesorie that they wanted to put on the fruit. Finally, we could really see a big progress, even there were only three students but they were able to show what they had learned specially Hector who was willing to participate and exciting to do every activity during every stage.

 

 

Conclusion

 

In conclusion,  this blog has provide us the oportunity to take a look to the journey that we took during the last six weeks in Teaching Practicum I. In this journal we could appreciate from a different perspective the progress of teaching EFL to children, and how this experience was exciting and succesful for everyone. Also, according to the children's progress we were able to see a very surprising progress through each lesson; specially with some of students who were shy at the begining but at the end they end up participating and producing new English vocabulary words. We believed that this progress was possible because of the activation of schema that was always present in each lesson, and which help students to recycle the information for the next lesson. Moreover, the use of Spanish was allowed in the first lesson, but it was interesting to see how students were able to addapt into this change; and we could really see the efficience of giving them instructions in English when we figured it out that at the end they were not using Spanish at all. Finally, this was a very good and amazing experience that we lived, specially because of the different techniques that we learned when performing as real teachers with real children.