On Tuesday the
25th I had my first class of this third period; I am working with Basic English
this time. I went to observe two classes before I started to teach, let me tell
you that at first, I thought the students were not going to participate in my
classes as some of them were not paying attention when the teacher was
explaining. But thank God, they cooperated with me on my first day of classes.
As they had been studying the simple past, I had to review what the teacher
previously taught.
I developed a
warm up activity in which students had to face each other, I gave each pair a
balloon and I played some music; mean while students had to pass the balloon
and say verbs in the past, and when I stopped the music the one who got the
balloon was going to be asked a question related to the simple past, I did that
some times and students seemed to like it. As presentation students had a
reading about Michael Jackson´s life; the task was to circle all the verbs they
could find in the past, after that I had students reading it and I made them
repeat some words they mispronounced.
On the grammar
point, I just focused on the affirmative and interrogative form of the past
tense, I explained to students about the auxiliary “did” that we use when
making questions as they had some problems on placing the auxiliary on their exams.
So I wrote some affirmative sentences on the board and then I wrote the
interrogative form for those questions. I explained to them that it is really
important to know in which thing we want to focus so that we can create the
question. For instance, if I say, Jane wrote a letter. We can get different
questions of that sentence depending what we want to know. So I wrote, what did
Jane wrote? And who wrote a letter. They asked me about the second option, as
we use “wrote” and I told them that it was ok, as in that case we are looking
for the subject, and that those questions are called “subject questions”. I could
see they understood, after that students worked on a crossword to look for
irregular verbs on the past. I brought a chart and had them repeat.
At the end, I pasted
another chart that contained some affirmative sentences and I started calling
students so that they could come up with the question forms. They did not have
any problem to make the sentences into interrogative. So I can say I reached my
objective; students were clearer on how to make questions. And I felt really
nice when being in front of them.
