first class reflections
I have had a very lovely morning, and of course didn’t get through all my planned activities. The group are lovely. They are from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Poland, Nepal and China and have been in country from between 1 ½ years up to 30 years! We did lots of ‘organise by alphabetical/numerical order’ activities giving opportunity for everyone to learn each other’s names. I think I just about have everyone’s and some of the stronger students could remember everyone’s too, but it was challenging for some of the students. Need to recap this next week, for me definitely although for them they will have met 3 more times before then.
It’s a very female dominated group, with just one young man in the group and I was conscious at one time that the q+a were dominated by asking about children. Other student’s seemed really interested in this and were working hard to make accurate sentences and really be listening to each other. A couple of the students were asking additional questions too, or asking for clarification on what was said which was nice to see.
After this extended group q+a the students were asking about writing the questions down, so I elicited the correct form again onto the WB. I think it was when we did this that I realised just how long we had spent on these few questions. With 30 mins of the lesson left I had to think on my feet a little, I thought we’d actually done enough work on names so didn’t want to do the Draw My Name activity, but was aware that we didn’t really have time to do a full language experience activity. I did feel that we had gathered a lot of information about each other and thought it would be nice to record this somewhere, so I did open up Word and start to elicit some ideas and build up a text. Everyone got a chance to contribute, either by suggesting an initial idea, helping to shape this into an accurate sentence or by reading the sentence. We also talked about full stops and capital letters and counted these up as the text lengthened. It was during this that I found out one student in particular struggles with reading and she gave me a ‘don’t ask me’ look, so I chose the shortest sentence for her to read.
We finished the lesson by picking out key words from the lesson and choosing as a group what would form the spelling test next week. I checked round that everyone had the correct spellings, a much needed activity as some had copied incorrectly. The lady who struggles with reading also has weak writing, doesn’t write on the line and has some spacing issues (I’ve seen this before in Iraqi learners) but she did copy everything correctly.
What I particularly liked about this lesson is that the language was generated by the students. The topic of personal information was set my me, but this seems an obvious topic for a first lesson but beyond this I really tried to pick up on what they wanted to ask or answer.
So next week I will certainly do the alphabet name/I like activity and possibly the name noughts and crosses and I will need to do the ‘formal’ writing diagnostic so I need to think about the best way to do this. There’ll be the spelling test and we can talk a little about LCWC method. I also need think about whether I want to do anything else with the text we created today, or if Thea wants to use it before then.
The following week is European Languages day (so I was told on #UKESOLchat last night!) and I want to do something on different greetings in different languages and so kind of ‘compare my language’ lesson This should be really interesting with should a diverse group.
