Hey... That's Me!

These these decorations me easily over 40 hours to make! 

Ever since I started decorating my classroom, I’ve been so far behind on my reflections. However I’ve still been recording my classes, at least once a week. So, for this reflection I used a video from three weeks ago. This was interesting because I didn’t know what to expect, like watching a stranger at first, but after a little bit I actually remembered teaching this class; because it was the second time trying pair work and I was pretty happy that it was a little easier than the first time. We still have a long way to go, but a small step forward is still going forward!

A positive thing that I noticed was I used preview, present, and practice. First I previewed the material by showing them flashcards of the vocabulary words. Despite straying from my objective of having the students say hello to each character; I feel that this was okay since the students were still engaged and motivated during the preview. During the present stage, I was successful at cutting down unnecessary teacher talk through scaffolding and role-play to have them use the TL. This was the first time that I tried a role-play exercise to present the TL from the workbook. They seemed to really enjoy it. Unfortunately I didn’t capture all of this because my camera wasn’t pointing in my direction, but it sounds like I am doing a great job! I was trying to use as many CI’s as I could through recast and some non-verbal cueing: facial expressions and body movement. For the practice stage, I broke the students up into pairs and had them ask each other the TL from their workbook before they put the sticker on. Like I said before, I was happy that some pairs were actually able to do this task without much guidance from me. 

As we know... For every yin there is a yang!
Now for the best part... what do I need to work on? For starters, after I do the greeting song I had the students pair off and act out the greeting song with their partner. When I saw that two of my students had done it correctly, I tried to have them model the correct actions and utterances for the class; to try cut down on teacher talk. While doing this I had turned my back to a table of students and blocked them from being able to see. Next time, I will have the students come to the front of class to model what to do: this will insure that all the students have a chance to see. Also, I need to be aware of my positioning relative to the students, I don’t want to seem closed off to them.
Another thing I noticed was that the students have a lot of dead time while I’m working with other pairs. I need to give the students a task to do after they are finished or since they are so young and handling unsupervised task are difficult; instead of using pairs for this activity I could divide them into two big groups, and we can do the task together. The tables are already separated, so this could easily be implemented. I feel that this would be a more efficient use of classroom interaction.