Records of Teaching Practice

  This past year of practice has taught me a lot about teaching. It was very valuable to witness other professional teachers with their classes and to observe how they dealt with the different aspects of a classroom. I find that the most beneficial parts for me were classroom and behaviour management. I was able to see how they effectively manage everything in a busy classroom while at the same time effectively teaching the necessary skills and content. I find that the most developmental part of the year for me was being able to start experimenting with my lesson plans and actual teaching experience. As my previous working experience was limited to being online, I had lacked the spatial management and behaviour control of a full classroom and that was very interesting to navigate. After my first few lessons I began to understand how to use the classroom to my advantage, opening many more doors to pair and group work, something that would have been very difficult for me to try in ...

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...