Here we go...

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.