I have had a certain amount of anxiety surrounding starting this blog. I'm not usually one who reflects in a 'public' way. I find I am more comfortable doing quiet reflection, both concerning my job, and in other areas of my life. Still, I am up to the challenge of putting myself onto 'centre stage' - especially if it means I walk away with new insights into how I can make meaningful changes both in my career, as well as my classroom.
It took me a long time to decide on a warm up activity for my first recorded class. I wanted the warm up to be interesting, and linked to what the children were learning in the unit (questions and sentences.) While I was working on the plan - it struck me that I very rarely do warm-ups these days. I always have "talk time" at the beginning of a lesson, but I don't often do planned out warm ups - and it made me think that I really should be doing them more often.
My plan for the warm up was to review questions. Knowing that the children were familiar with how to identify and make questions - I thought it would be a good warm up to have them unscramble questions, and then have the opportunity to ask and answer those questions, before reporting back to the group. I had planned a backup of children making their own questions to ask, but timing meant I wasn't able to get to that stage.
In the lesson I used few materials - 4 envelopes each containing the pieces of paper making up the questions. I also gave children tape to use to stick the questions together. In our discussion time, I used the whiteboard to highlight important points. I feel as though the materials were effective. Watching the video made me feel as though the activity may have been a bit boring for the children because of the lack of materials. On the other hand, fewer materials meant that they were able to practice the questions - which was the main aim.
Thinking about the activity - I think it worked well, in that children did get to ask and answer questions, and reflect on how questions are different to sentences and statements. I also asked them to summarise the answers that their friends gave, meaning they needed to think about tense and grammar.
During the planning stage, I specifically included pair work, because I don't often do pair work with classes. I usually often ask children questions, or they ask me questions, but I don't often do pair work - perhaps because at my school, children are encouraged to do a lot of free speaking, so in our lessons, children are always speaking to each other...although admittedly, it's not always correct. I also took the opportunity to do pair work because I knew the children were a merged group from 2 different kindergarten classes on their first day, so I wanted them to get to know each other.
I feel like the lesson had a good flow. I gave directions, and children followed through, meandering along the way with comments and their own questions. Children had time to share their ideas, and in this lesson, they did bring up different topics and unrelated news, which kept us all talking.
We did have an amusing point when one of the children noticed a man in the building next door. He must have been installing something, and she asked about him. At first it threw me, but I took her lead and included him as a way to make some more questions, and this sparked some interesting conversation (especially, 'When will a bot become a man?) I think I was happy at the way the lesson turned out in terms of the free speaking that emerged - that may be the main accomplishment of the day.
I think the most successful part of the lesson was the children being able to ask and answer the questions, as well as summarise their partner's answer for the report back. They all had a chance to practice using the questions, and they all had a chance at answering them.
I wish we had more time to move to the back-up of making their own questions, but that was part of their homework, so even though we didn't do it together in class, they will be forming questions for homework, and we'll use these next week.
The things I will definitely take with me from this lesson:
doing more warm ups... and doing more pair work! If I am honest, I think I avoid both because
a)I am lazy when it comes to prepping,
b) our classes are so short, and we need to cover a lot, so I usually don't make time for children to do pair work. We usually do group discussions, or individual teacher-student questioning.
One other thing I noticed is that in the video, I paid a lot of attention to one of the pairs more than the other. While I don't think it was necessarily unfair, I noticed it. I think I will be working on circulating more often, and not staying with one group more than others. Being that this class only has 4 children, I do realise that splitting "teacher time" with all children is important. I'm going to work on that.
Seeing myself on the video was quite startling at first. Listening to the way I interact with the children was interesting. I use a lot of "action sounds" to create humour or effect, and while this may be appropriate with these 8 year olds, it wouldn't necessarily be appropriate with older students. It has me wondering whether I always sound that "silly???"
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