Records of Teaching Practice

Fifth Lesson - Grade 3 The Giant’s Causeway - Lesson Plan Stage 1: Hand out sets of pictures to every pair of students (pictures without the words). Ask them to predict what is going to happen in the story by having them put the story in the order they think it's supposed to be. Go around and ask groups what they think the story is. (predictions) Stage 2: Read the story together as a group, ask the class if their predictions came true. Stage 3: Ask students to complete activities 3 and 4 in the book.  Stage 4: In pairs, students are to discuss what they think Orla’s feelings were when they couldn’t find the giant. Stage 5: If there is still time, go back to activities 3 and 4 from the workbook. At the end of this lesson I also gave out Action Research exit slips about working in groups/pairs/individually. This lesson occurred right after my 4th lesson and a short break. It was a little bit harder to manage compared to the previous one as the students were still excited after thei...

Fourth Lesson - Grade 3 Lesson plan: Adventure Park Stage 1: Images from the textbook. Students repeat the vocabulary after the teacher. Include actions for the words. Play an action guessing game with the students. Stage 2: Introduce the phrase “There was a…” (This might be a repetition from a previous lesson) when going over the new vocabulary. Play the listening activity. Have students join the words depending on the audio. (Go over the pictures and words before the audio is played). Do activity 4 and present it on the board. Draw what the students say.  Stage 3: Ask the student to get into pairs and ask them to draw their own adventure park together. They are to draw and label their parks and if they want, they can present their parks to the class afterwards. Stage 4: Introduce the modals “could” and “couldn’t” in the example sentences. Come up with examples to model it with then get examples from the students on what they could or couldn't do. Explain that it is the past tens...

   Third Lesson - Grade 2 - CLIL part 2 This next lesson was conducted with the same grade as a continuation to the previous one. However, it was taught a few weeks after the first one so I had to introduce and include a revision activity at the beginning in order to refresh their memories of what we had worked on in the past. I had to make some alternative changes to the original plan idea as during the first lesson, the vocabulary we worked on wasn’t as well understood as I had expected. So instead of doing “Stage 1: Revise the verbs from the previous lessons. Ask different students to act out one of the verbs and everyone else has to guess what action they are doing.” We instead just went over the different actions and vocabulary (at their own desks) before I stuck the vocabulary onto the whiteboard for easy access.  Furthermore, related to my lesson plan, I made some other minor changes when actually teaching but I will get to those soon. Similarly to the previous les...

  16: Second Lesson - Grade 2 CLIL The next two lessons I led were specifically CLIL based lessons, in my case they were specifically based on the topic of “Games around the world”. I quickly found that it was a pretty difficult topic to plan a lesson for as while the topic would have been very interesting for the learners, implementing language and new information could get quite complicated. I struggled with my lesson plan at first, having to redo it a few times until I was happy with it. The main issue that I faced was planning a lesson simple enough for grade 2 while at the same time introducing new content and language simultaneously. My first few attempts at planning the lesson turned out to be way too hard for the age and level of my students, but in the end, this lesson plan is what I came up with. INSERT PHOTOS OF BOARD GAMES WE PLAYED I had thought that I had planned for all possible issues by scaffolding the lesson correctly and organising the distribution of the game ef...

How can I foster a classroom environment that encourages meaningful interactions and cooperative learning in an English language classroom? Observations Through my observations I was able to witness the styles of different teachers, student and full-time teachers, so through those observations I was able to see how each of them looks at and deals with classroom participation and the interactions between their students. I found it interesting how each teacher dealt with their different age groups and the methods which each of them employed. Here are some of the most memorable moments from these lessons in regards to student participation. When talking about “participation”, I am referring to the general student participation in the lesson, which includes vocal participation (in the form of answering questions), group and pair work (are the students interacting among themselves about the lesson?) as well as individual work (personalised writing or answering of questions).. Example 1 - On...

  First Lesson: Grade 3 The next lesson that I taught was a grade 3 class in which I was introducing the topic of maps. Overall it was a pretty simple lesson and the class picked up on the vocabulary and ideas in the topic really easily so I found that the students were either finished really fast or getting bored really quickly. It was tricky to manage because of this but it worked out well in the end.  I started off with moving the class to the carpet at the back of the room where I asked all of the students to sit in a circle before putting a map in the middle for everyone to see. It was the same map that they had in their textbooks so for those who couldn’t see, I asked to look at the books too. First, we went over the keywords in the textbook, rock, path, forest, car park, picnic area, bridge waterfall and river. To my surprise, they picked up on these really fast and were able to name all of the keywords really fast. But this made it easy to move on to the next activity....