Video Lesson Reflection 2

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1kGeSKXiVo&t=299s 

Video Lesson Observation

• What is your general reflection on the lesson?

Overall, while there were some positive aspects of this lesson, the lesson seemed to be very scattered and without purpose. It is hard to understand what the goal language there was in this lesson as many different topics were mentioned and used. Animals, colours, numbers, fruit interposed with other general questions which only had simple one word answers. There is no clear direction of what the lesson was leading towards and no notion of what the main activity was going to be until the story time actually occurred.

Besides the lack of structure in the lesson, the students had no space to grow their language skills and improve as they were only able to give singular vocabulary answers without anything else. The teacher also did not attempt to illicit any phrase or sentence building. Even something as simple as using "it is..." during one of the games would have been a huge improvement. 

Overall, the lesson did not seem very interesting as a viewer and for the students themselves as at the end of the lesson, it can be heard that one of the students says "Finally its over!" showing that they were not especially invested in the class either.

• Which activity do you particularly like?

I really enjoy the use of a book and storytelling in this classroom. Books are generally a really good tool and by having the students describe different aspects of it is a really good method of teaching, as it allows the students to describe the pictures and use their English vocabulary. 

It was a very interactive activity in which the teacher was at the same level as the students (while sitting on the ground) in a more comfortable and personal situation and setting. It is something that's a lot more comfortable for everyone involved. As compared to activities at desks which put literal distance between the teacher and students, as well as between the classmates themselves. 

• What are the strong sides of the lesson, in your opinion?

I believe that the strong parts of this lesson were definitely the classroom management that the teacher displayed. As even though it seemed like a chaotic lesson (due to the constant moving from table to floor, to board), the teacher was able to carefully control the environment and kept everything organised when diving groups and organising the activities. 

The activity that stuck out to me the most was the storybook reading as the teacher was able to engage the whole classroom in the story by asking visual questions about what they see in the book, emphasising and helping the students understand the story. Due to the fact that at this age, the students would not be able to read the story themselves, it is a really good method by just using visuals for the lesson.

• What could have been done better?

The teacher fails to correct students on their understanding. Multiple times through the lesson, the students believe that the word "bad" means "sad" and "good" means "happy". Which leads to the issue at the end of the storytelling activity when the teacher asks, "Was the witch good or bad?", the students answer "bad" because throughout the story, the witch was sad about her cat. Yet she fails to show any reason or explanation why "good" was the correct answer.

Due to the low level of teaching that is displayed in this class, the teacher believes that the students will not understand anything more difficult and and only focuses on on singular vocabulary words which seem somewhat unrelated to each other. She goes from talking about different animals like "spider" and "teddy bear" to "witch" and "Santa clause". While the "witch" was relevant to the lesson as they would go onto reading a story about a witch, it would have made more sense to focus on vocabulary that was present in the main activity - the story. Words such as "magic", "witch", "rainbow", other colours, "turned" would have been much more beneficial. Even better if they revised whole sentences rather than singular words. 

In more general terms, having a focused class, looking at a specific topic would have organised and led the class much better than it had been done in this situation.

• How does the teacher deal with classroom management?

The teacher's method of controlling her class is generally really well executed. She maintains a good level of volume and when the noise exceeds that level, she used the count down method to regroup her class's focus which works perfectly for this group as by the end of the countdown everyone is listening again. It is something that clearly works for her class really well, especially with the amount of students that she has. There is a lot of distraction in this particular session (parents and cameras being present) so it is understandable that the students may get distracted at times, however it is dealt with swiftly and without many issues. 

There are also times where the teacher has to call on specific students in order to manage their behaviour, but these are not very common during this lesson, showing that her usual methods are effective.

• What types of activities does she use?

There are many different small activities which are present in this lesson, which makes sense due to the age of the students and their short attention spans, making it necessary to swap between activities often. Some of the activities are really good while others could be done much better.

First of all, as mentioned before, it is hard to tell what the lesson objectives are in this class so it is hard to figure out which of her activities was effective. I believe that the beginning activity, having the whole class sit in a circle, was a really good idea with a bad execution. It is a more informal situation, and by sitting in the floor, the students may be more comfortable with different games. However the activities played seemed to be very preliminary. When asking the "how are you today?" question, each student just replied the same thing as before. It would have been much better if there was some form of a prompt that they could use to come up with a more imaginative answer. (For example, images of different emotions that they could point to and learn different emotions like "I'm tired" or "I'm bored" etc. other than the standard "I'm fine".)

One of the middle activities required the class to be split into two teams where they had to guess which vocabulary was being spoken. Once again, while the idea was good, the execution of it, not as much. The students at the back of the que got bored and distracted very fast and rather than practicing the vocabulary, the students just had to point to a picture of the word spoken by the teacher. While at the basis, it was a competitive game, that element of it was muted by the lack of urgency or interest from the students. 

• What props and materials does she use?

Not many props are used in this lesson. There is the toy used in the introduction warmup game, but it is only used to indicate the speaker and to add a little bit of fun to the activity.

The storybook, which I assume is the main activity of this lesson, is a really good tool for the lesson as it keeps the students engaged and interested, especially with colourful pictures and an interesting premise. It was a really good tool to use, however could have been used better in an introduction of he vocabulary, (instead of drawing slightly irrelevant images on the blackboard).