The background
On the 17th of February, I, together with my three other colleagues, were assigned to teach EC. 2A students. At first, I was feeling like..oh, Ok..I have ever taught little EC class before, so I could sort of figure out the situation I was going to face in that class, and besides..I had seen Ms. Winda in that class before..so..hehe…I sort of knew the students in that class.
After a quite long discussion, finally we decided to teach these expressions : “ I like burger. Do you like burger?” “ Yes, I do” and “No, I don’t”. And the long and winding road began……..
The Preparation
Teaching EC classes means massive preparations. We collected pictures of many kinds of food, we copied, we cut, we sliced..hehe *cake?*, we glued, we made simple questionnaire..in short, we sacrified all of our knowledge and our life for the sake of an hour session teaching EC class. We enjoyed it, though..*wink wink*
The scenario
Here was the scenario…
The warm-up
The idea of warming-up was that, we wanted to tap students’ schemata about food. Besides, it would be a review of the previous lesson. As usual, something always happened when we talked about lesson plan and doing the lesson plan. Lol. I was the one who had to do the warm-up. And I was luckier I guess, because I got the first turn, meaning that, the students were still on their first thirty-minute attention span. The real plan was..using their pictures and introducing the concept of like and dislike. Again, I was luckier, because it seemed that most of them had known the concept of likes and dislikes. The thumb cards did a great job, though! * thank you for lending us the cards, ma’am.. *
The presentation
The presentation went in line with the warm-up, which meant that, I was the one who did it. Actually I wanted to conduct drilling activity, but I cancelled that, it was because of the time limit. So in that point, my job was done.
The practice
Ok. A bit flashback on the theory of child development about cognitive, social/emotional, physical, and Language development. We tried to apply that theory into practice. There were two activities we planned. Here are the activities :
• We were trying to involve the students to build the four development. We seated them into a big circle and tried to make them practice the speaking skill using the expressions taught by asking a friend next to him the question “do you like banana?” we expected that the friend would answer the question with “yes, I do” or “No, I don’t”. It was very effective at the first round. Some students didn’t get the gist of what they must do, but, the students who knew how to conduct the activity told them what to do, so I guess, the social interaction, as well as the language interaction were formed here. Funny was when one of the students tended to form the question began with “ what “, so the question was formed “what do you like pizza?” Lol..but then, again, there was a sort of peer correction here, the friends corrected him. The activity was successfully executed. Executor : Miss Devi.
• The second practice was pair work. Students were paired up by the teacher. At that time, the golden thirty minutes has already lost its charm. They started to become restless. That was not the point, anyway. In my opinion, the aim of the activity was achieved. They could do the pair work, some of them DID enjoy the activity. A little bit idea, though. I think, It would be better if the teacher paired them up first, then gave the instruction later after she was sure that everybody was listening. Or, she could seated them on the chair, already with the partner, to keep them from wrestling or chatting with their friends, thus, making them readier for the activity. Executor : Miss Didy.
The production
Here was the last stage. We intended to give them questionnaires, and ask them to ask five of their friends. Again, because the students’ attention were already gone, they didn’t listen to their teacher’s instruction well. Actually, they were supposed to ask their friends, but instead of asking the questions to their friends, almost all of them had answered the questionnaire by themselves without asking their friends! ..Lol…but finally all of them could do the activity. Executor : Miss Rahma a.k.a the class teacher.
All and all, those were the stages of the practice teaching. It was fun though..hehe…although things were not exactly done as we expected before, but hey, we must be careful with our expectation when dealing with teaching children, right? But one thing for sure, there was one thing that I realized later on, we accidentally designed the questions or the lesson in such a way that the answers were all “ yes, I do “..Lol…we forgot to insert the name of food that the student might not like. So, we can see that, the space for the “No, I don’t” answers were blank! Lol….
( taken from my teaching journal submitted to my trainer on teaching Children )
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