Third Lesson - Grade 2 - CLIL

  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 lesson, this one started just as well, the students were all sitting at their desks (likely the reason why they were focused) and we started off with our opening activity, which, as explained before, was remembering and doing the actions related to the verbs from the previous lesson. This went well as while some students did not remember all of the vocabulary, the fact that we had actions involved and that everyone in the class was doing them, made it easy for everyone to follow along.

The next stage of the lesson went okay but not as smoothly as the first one as it required a game, which, from my previous experience, often gets the learners really excited and loses focus. In this case, I was a little more nervous as it was a handmade game with a single game board, something that would be difficult to play with a group of 17 students. Nevertheless, as it was a presentation of what can be made, I didn’t want to spend too much time playing my game and instead focus on the later parts of the lesson. This did, however, take quite a bit of time as it was still necessary to show the students what they could do and how it could be done. 

I started off by showing them my “How to play: Cat & Mouse Game” instruction guide. We read through the instructions together and looked at the pictures. I then took out the board game to show them how to play. I asked them if they could show me how to play based on the instructions. While this was a good idea at first, I had to make sure that only a few students were talking and trying to explain. A lot of them tried to default into Polish and I had to deter them from that. But in the end, the instructions were understood.

The main hiccups were having everyone get a turn, as there were 17 of them, everyone wanted to play and get a turn at moving the cats or mice and, because of the lack of space, it was hard to make an orderly line for them to each take turns, and even then the turns took a while and so after each roll, the students who had already played would get bored and distracted. This made the circle a little chaotic and hard to control (classroom management) again.

But, we soon moved onto the next part of the lesson, I stuck my game model on the whiteboard and handed out the blank “how to play” sheets for them to fill out. The tricky part of this for them was the writing. While I had given them the necessary verbs for this activity, due to their age and level, they still struggled writing out the different full sentences. I told them that they could write them in Polish if they wanted to, but they would have to explain them to others in English. This was a double edged sword as they wouldn't know how to explain them in English afterwards, but it was still practise for them nevertheless.

Most of the students were able to do the instructions in at least the pictures and many struggled with the full writing. They were all able to make some form of a board game in the end. An issue I noticed was that most of them made the same game as I did, as it was the only one I presented that lesson (likely forgotten about the previous CLIL lesson we had, plus they would have been difficult to recreate with paper). I should have presented different types of games that they could make (maybe find examples of ones other children have made before as examples.)

Overall, the lesson was not a tragedy, while there were a lot of things that I could have improved in my original lesson plan, such as scaffolding more vocabulary and grammatical structures, I'm not sure how I would have done that in this specific CLIL based lesson. My classroom management also needs to be improved. The main success criteria of the lesson had been met, although not to the full standard that I would have hoped. They were able to create something based on this and the previous lesson. If I had more time, I would try to scaffold more information about games, such as things like the basis of game rules, traditional games, history and some other interesting information about games around the world. I definitely need to work on making a stronger connection between language and content in my CLIL lessons.