PM Time - What do I do??

Most of my blogs, to date, have been about general experiences and when I do comment on my teaching it’s, more often than not, about my kindergarten class. So I thought it was about time to make a substantial contribution about my Elementary classes.

To fill you in. My classes run from 14:00 through to 18:15 on Mon, Wed and Fri and then from 14:00 to 17:30 on Tue and Thur. I have 3 classes that are basic text books. They have a student book; which consists of phrases, conversation time, new vocabulary, practice time etc. This is usually accompanied with a CD and/or tape (the voice on the tape is a mixture of male and female BUT is always an American accent – which had resulted in me occasionally slipping into it myself). They also have a workbook, which is a book that allows the kids to put the ‘English’ they have learnt into immediate practice. The workbook consists of a number of different writing tasks. Finally some of the books come with a homework booklet – this is very similar to the workbook.

In terms of teaching. It’s pretty straight forward. It’s teaching the day to day stuff that us English use but don’t realise we are doing so. For example. We naturally say – These are my shoes and Whose shoes are these? rather than This is my shoes and Whose shows are this? It is fairly simple to teach, but there are a number of other similar grammar uses that aren’t so easy to explain. With be new to the teaching profession it does bring the odd tricky moment. Some of the kids are VERY bright and demanding in terms of their English knowledge. They want to know it all and they want to know it at his most specific definition. They don’t want a waffled explanation, they want cut-throat, bullet pointed, gold plated, purified factual information, all at an instant.

My other classes are labelled ESL classes. I have big story books and have the freedom to express what I want to the kids within the book. For example we had a story called ‘The Mixed-Up Chameleon’. It was a fantasy story. So I took a week out from the book and we discussed fantasy characters (i.e. Superman, Mermaid, etc etc) and then created our own character and then gave him/her special powers. I have just finished a 4 week project with them. The project was designed to educate the kids on the plot (start, middle and end of a story – so the WHAT), setting (The WHERE) and other details like the WHEN and the WHO (characters) of a good story. The kids created their own 8 page story book that consisted of the following. Page 1 – Title Page, Page 2 – The Plot, Page 3 – Introduction to characters, Page 4 – The Settings, Page 5, Start of the story, Page 6 – Middle of the story, Page 7 – The End. Finally page 8 is about the Author and Illustrator, which is of course the student. The picture above is of this class - behind them was a game of 100 words!!