During my second chance teaching to
this particular group, I can share with you that I really like them. It doesn´t
matter the first impression we got from them, by this time they have worked
with us in every single activity we asked them to, and that attitude set them
in different perspective.
As we know, the grammar part is the
most challenging and difficult for the teacher, it doesn´t matter how prepared
you think you are, there always will be a detail that will make you hesitate.
This time I started my class playing
with them the famous hot potato but with a BIG DICE, this dice was prepared
with adverbs of frequency like : always, almost always, never, usually, etc.
they had to pass the dice while the music was playing, once it stopped, the ss
with the dice on her hands had to throw it on the floor, and according with the
adverb she/he had to say a sentence using it.
After that, I pasted a chart with a
dialogue including the famous adverbs of frequency, this time it didn´t work as
I wanted and I will share with you why. Even though it was not my first idea, I
have to give an advice. In first place
we must be careful with the words we are going to work with, remember that for
us can sound easy, manageable, known, etc, but I felt really worried when I started
reading the dialogue and the girls couldn´t pronounce words such as “once and
twice” another girl didn´t know the meaning of snack, and things like those. What
at the beginning was a simple and funny activity, at the end was a headache
because most of them had serious problems with pronunciation and vocabulary in
general.
Another disadvantage is that we have
everything planned and timed, and if you have to slow down your own pace in the
class, will have a cost at the end, specially with the grammar explanation
related with how to create WH Questions using the adverbs of frequency. Because
of my personal experience, I really enjoy working the grammar part development
with everybody`s help. I consider that including the whole class during the most
“difficult” part will help you a lot in two main key parts, the first one you
will catch the ss attention and everybody will want to know how to deal with
the structure, and on the other hand asking for help and making mistakes all
together, will reinforce the ss self esteem because the entire group will help at
the same time to build or construct the sentences.
At the end everything went well and
I felt really satisfied, because most of
them knew how to work creating wh questions using the adverbs, and that`s what makes
the teacher happy…
