Here is the last session of my "Hobbies and Free Time" English class. After posting about it for 2 days now. I promise to finish the series with it. I found myself actually having a good time writing and reflecting about it and honestly it'd be even better if these posts can be useful to you readers out there. So, please let me know if there's anything I could help you with.
As I was saying, my project with UNICEF was something I was happy with, work wise and result wise. That's why I wanted to share these experiences with you guys. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, you can click these links, in which I explained the project to give you guys the context of it).
After the Morning classand the Vocabulary Session, they all lead to this last session of "Learning Grammar and Put it into Use", which is the most important part of the lesson, that I could see if this class succeeded or not. First, we had to make sure that they learned the vocabulary and I wasn't gonna be doing the boring vocabulary memorizing session again. We were gonna play a game instead.
The most original vocabulary game is charades. I divided the students into 3 groups. Each groups would send out a person, see the word...
... act out and...
let the rest of the group guess! Like this one, can you guess which hobby is this?
the group that guesses correctly will get the point.
After we kinda made sure they did have some words. It's time for grammar and/or in this case put those vocabulary into sentences. This session, I left it for my duo teacher take over.
She prepared a slide, started with the pronouns (which we already reviewed with them in the morning remember?)
She taught the grammar, explaining that Ving (Gerund) and Vinf (Verb infinitive) can NEVER be in the same sentence. They despise each other. Forever feud.
So, how are you gonna do this?
That's right!
Then we gave them the `must know´ sentences of the day...
...and the example conversations.
The key here is to keep the lecture part short and concise to keep their attention with the class. What I wished we did though is to provide them tables, so they could write better. We just didn't have enough time to move stuff then.
At this time, our teaching team and I were sitting with the students to make sure that they were writing down and following the main teacher there.
Then we gave them worksheets, which are divided into groups according to their skill in English (like in the morning) to make sure each would have the most appropriate exercise. For example the easy group would just put the words in and the harder ones would have to write and translate the sentences.
We put extra work into making sure each student got to do the worksheet that's neither too hard or too easy for them.
This is an ideal way and I hope every classroom could be like this too. Because the reality is, everybody just needs their own pace and the right amount of learning into achieve the most that they can. Unfortunately the classes these days force the teachers to not be able to provide that. Especially here in Thailand, the teachers had to do lots (and I mean A LOT) of paper work that didn't really related to the class and not have enough time to prepare for the class. This truth is truly the saddest thing in my opinion.
Last thing for today is the game called "Treasure Hunt". I divided the students into groups, each had all the members from the different skills group. And they had to go ask all the teachers team "what our hobbies are".
Each of us were assigned different hobbies that the students needed to collect all of our answers within the time limit.
We could only say the answer if they asked us right.
And sometimes, for some smart students we would make them do more than just ask to challenge them.
Needless to say that it was messy and chaotic, yet full of enthusiasm and learning that each students displayed, which is exactly what I hoped for.
When the timers go off as the time's up, we collected the points and gave the rewards to the winner. Just before we said goodbye, the students had to come up to one of the staff and do a quick reflection of what they learned today about English and about themselves.
And that's the class for that day guys!. Thank you so much for stopping by and as in the beginning, I hope we get to share and exchange tips and tricks to improve ourselves everyday.
So, let's keep challenging ourselves.
Khob khun kaa,
Nomnomnoodle 🍜