Micro Teaching - Grade 2 (1)

 Micro Teaching (1)

For my micro-teaching activities, I did all of the activities within the same classroom and the same lesson but divided it into clear activities which I will discuss in this section. The total amount of activities for these lessons amounted to three full class lessons and these took place in a grade 2 classroom.

To start off, as it was my first direct teaching experience, I was somewhat nervous, which is to be expected, as it was a new environment with which I was somewhat unfamiliar, however, while I was nervous it wasn't as bad as I had expected. As I have some previous experience with teaching English, albeit in a different situation, my past experiences helped with this one more than I anticipated. For context, I have previously taught English full-time in South Korea over a period of a year, which in normal circumstances would have completely prepared me for the kind of teaching I had to do here. However, due to COVID restrictions, all of my lessons were held online for the whole duration of my stay abroad. Nevertheless, I still got some teaching experience, as the lessons were held online, so aspects such as instruction, explanation, lesson planning, and encouraging language production were things familiar to me. The main aspects of teaching which I had missed out on were classroom and behaviour management which were undoubtedly much harder in person than online. It was a lot easier to adjust to classroom teaching due to my past experience, however, there was still a lot that I wanted to become comfortable and familiar with.

To start of with, I was tasked with planning for my lesson with the information that I had been given from my mentor teacher. I had previously observed the said class and so was able to recall the topics and ideas that were taught before as well as knowing the general level of the student’s language skills. This, along with the information gained from their teacher, enabled me to organise my notes and plan for my lesson. I have added an image of my original lesson plan, which I will be reflecting on and talking about in a moment.

(First teaching activity) I was asked to plan for a grade 2 class who are the time looking at the topic of " my favourite things" which included new vocabulary based around personal possessions such as 'video game', 'trophy', 'bracelet', 'watch', 'guitar', among others. This vocabulary had been introduced to them in the previous lesson I had observed so to start with my first job and first activity was to review this vocabulary. I wanted to make this fun for the students so I planned a small game where I would present the images of the vocabulary, stick them onto the board, have the students close their eyes, remove one of the objects and have the students guess what is missing. This not only practice their recall of vocabulary but also their knowledge of it, this was just a simple opening activity following which we looked at a concept that would place these words in a context. 

(Second teaching activity) Next, in the main part of the lesson, we looked at the difference between "her" and "his", emphasizing the gendered difference between the two. I did this through drawings and labels on the Whiteboard sticking the previously used images with the drawings and asking the question "Who's ___ is it?" to which the students would reply "It's his/her ____." this worked well as it was a simple concept which was easy to explain with images and the students were easily able to work out what was being asked of them. 

Before the lesson, I had been asked by the teacher to give the students time to work on the student books to complete different activities related to this topic. So after this presentation, I asked the students to do just that. (Third teaching activity) I gave them a specific page number and activity number on which they would work and gave them time to figure out the answers. While they worked on these activities, I floated around the room to see how they were doing and helping out those who seemed to be struggling. I noticed that some students were much stronger than others and were able to move on to the next activities before being prompted while others required a little bit more time to figure out each activity. When I noticed that the majority were done with a certain activity we went over the answers as a group. At times (like in this situation) I used a name picker so that each student was able to answer the questions. 

I noticed that one of the last book activities was much harder than the previous ones, and it required a little bit more explanation so I did that in between the activities by using the whiteboard as a presentational tool and understanding checking questions for the students. I had been told that they had been introduced to this before in the previous lessons, so it was good to review and revise the sentence formats and structures for that activity. When the lesson was coming to an end I asked the students to let me know when I had finished the final activity, which I would then check, and if they had done them properly they were allowed to go on a slightly earlier break. That is where my first lesson with this class ended. 

I had extra activities prepared which focused on further sentence structures and vocabulary, however, there was not enough time to do them. This was a challenge with a class I had never taught before as it is hard to gauge how long an activity will take or how long students would take doing a specific exercise. However, it was a good start at standing in front of a class, teaching them and managing the lesson time accordingly. In conclusion, it ended up being a pretty good lesson to start off with, when it was generally pretty simple and it didn't have that many varied activities it was very beneficial for my understanding as well as a language review for the students. Especially since the workbook activities had to be done eventually, having them done gave me confidence that the students understood the content and sentence formations in this given topic. 

Overall, I believe that my lesson plan worked really well, as it was simple enough to be understood by the students and easy for me to follow and alter however necessary during the lesson it is good that I made sure not to add too many details as that would have confused both me and the students. My mentor teacher also did not have any major concerns or things I should focus on and improve on relating to my lesson. So all in all, I would consider this lesson a success.

Following this, a few weeks later I got the chance to teach the same class again, this time teaching them for a double period. Having been given information and the topics that I was to cover in this class I got to planning. Going into this lesson I was a lot more confident than previously as it was not my first time teaching this class so I started off my first activity by reviewing their previous vocabulary mentioned previously as a quick reminder before moving into the new words that we would have been focusing on that day, in this case, it was clothing items (hoodie, jeans, coat, sandals, boots, pyjamas). some of the students already knew a lot of these words so it also acted as a refresher for them and an introduction for the ones who knew less about the topic. I started off by having the students repeat the vocabulary words after me to get familiar with the pronunciation before making it into a game. I drew an outline of a person on the whiteboard (which the students quickly named Pawel) and asked different students to come up to the board and draw on a piece of clothing for the rest of the class to guess. As a lot of the students wanted to participate we quickly ran out of vocabulary and clothing items to draw so we resorted to adding previous vocabulary which was still relevant. 

We then practised the sentence structure of “Have you got ___? Yes, I have/No, I haven’t.” on the whiteboard in order to introduce the vocabulary and grammar in context. After running through the class using this method we moved on to the next, more fun activity.

For the next activity, I asked everyone to sit down in a circle on the carpet where we would all practice speaking. I had made this guideline/template which I had placed in the middle of the circle for the students to have a guide or a crutch for their sentences and asked them to come up with one following the sentence structure that we had learnt, this is when, i have noticed, it is the hardest to manage the classroom as, due to the different setting and more closer proximity between the students, more chatter and lack of focus showed. This was likely because we were looking at more individual answers to the questions, a lot more distractions around us and an activity which could have been more engaging. 

The sentences I wanted them to practice were “What are you wearing?”/“I’m wearing ____.” Which I had hoped one student would ask another. A suggestion from my mentor teacher made this activity more interesting for them, as I asked them all to go and bring a piece of clothing from the cloakroom for them to talk about. Most of them brought some boots, a jacket, a hat or other articles of clothing and this made it a lot more interesting for them as they shared what they had. (Including talking about the colour of their clothes.) At this point, their first lesson ended and I got ready for our next one.

The next activity focused on reading text from their workbooks. In an image which I have attached here, the students were first asked to read the text one at a time (one box per student) in order to practice reading. After this, I asked for volunteers to be the different characters in the story. I had made paper crowns to represent each character and the students were really excited about them after the first turn, everyone wanted to participate. We ran through the play a couple of times until everyone who wanted to was able to practice before moving on to the next few activities. We moved on to some concept-checking questions in the book and workbooks which they all did individually and I monitored to check how they were going. As the lessons were coming to an end, I asked them to show me their books before going on their breaks. 

Overall, I think the lessons were pretty successful as for the majority of the time the students were engaged and focused. The main issue was during the carpet circle time. I think next time I will organise the activity better to make the students more interested and engaged. Maybe organise the circle better where the students aren’t sitting next to their friends, something that made it wąsy for them to be distracted.