My first day of classes is over and, well, I’m still alive. Actually, things went quite well. Although I pretty much have syllabi for all my classes, today was just an introductory lesson. I took this idea from a book. I brought in my MP3 player and small speakers and asked the class to stand up. When I was playing the music (Jackson 5 – ABC,) the students would walk around the classroom, kind of mingling. When I would pause the music, I’d shout out a command that they’d have to complete quickly. The commands ranged from getting into groups of different sizes to working as a team to create a logo.
The logo part of the exercise was quite fun as I had the students come up to the board and draw the logo, then have other teams try to guess its meaning. It shed a bit of light on the personalities of the students, which is what I want to get to know. Then for the second exercise I broke them down into different groups and asked them to designate a secretary. Each group was given 5 minutes to write down as many uses as possible for a plastic tupperware container which I had brought in. After the 5 minutes I asked each group to say the 3-4 most interesting, and some were quite funny.
Then, if I had time, I did a similar exercise with a flower I had brought in. This one, however, was for verbs. On the board I wrote three categories: Nurture, Exchange, Destroy. The students had to come up with appropriate verbs of what they could do to/with the flower under these headings. Though this one was a little more difficult, they enjoyed it, especially Destroy. I have some more introductory classes for the rest of the week and I think I’ll stick with this format. I think it is a good creativity stimulator – something I’m sensing they get little of from most of their (older) teachers.
Next week is when I have planned lessons beginning. For History, Geography and Culture/Civ, I have pretty much come up with the topics already, with of course a few empty spots for what may come. The Conversation course, which constitutes the bulk of what I’ll be doing, is still gelling. I need to get a better grasp of the students’ levels first, so that I can decide how much “guided speaking” is necessary. Overall, though, the students’ English level is quite good, and I think my task will be to get them more comfortable with expressing themselves.
That’s ingenious. I wouldn’t be surprised if you earned yourself some classroom street cred with that – like you said, I can’t see the typical teacher, Romanian or American, starting classes with games like that. So now you know that your students have a penchant for destroying plants. That could be useful.
As for getting them to express themselves, have you thought about setting up a classroom blog or something? Especially if you set it so that their names wouldn’t appear on the site, they might enjoy writing stuff and having it go online, and trying to figure out who’d written what.
Good luck with everything. It sounds like you’re off to a good start over there.
I wish you were my teacher.
Hejsan matt!
interesting life you live… being on the other side of education – hope you enjoy it as long as possible. there will be hard times when you notice that the students do not improve as you want them to do. I really would have enjoyed it to have you as my teacher 😉
I read in the newspapers this week that there were floodings in romania again – but just a short article. and you find long articles about the hurricans in our newspapers – that´s a shame.
what are your plans for christmas holidays? want to travel a little bit? I´ll be off work for nearly 2 weeks, I think…so we could meet somewhere or you maybe want to visit graz?
have a great weekend! kram johannes
Great stuff, Matt B. Music makes it fun…what was the name of your exercise? Musical Meetings? That’s a great lesson plan and you might consider posting it on some of the online lesson planning sites.
With hearts,
M@K