Week 9

March 8, 2011

At the beginning of this week I tried some new games and activities with my students and they went over pretty well. As a review warm up I created a matching type game with index cards and put students into groups and each group got an envelope of cards and had to put the information together with the correct category. I also borrowed mini dry erase boards from another teacher and worked with those. Each student got to use a board and a marker and we practiced conjugating ER/IR verbs in the preterit. It was an easy informal assessment for me. I was able to see pretty quickly if students were getting the conjugations or still struggling. And the students liked having something tangible to hold and play with. We are planning to test next week so we have mainly been doing a lot of practice lately and reinforcement activities. The grammar has been getting more and more challenging and often times it just takes practice and different types of input to help students and to allow the material to “click”.

March 11, 2011

The second half of this week went smoothly. I was able to include some more technology in class this week and the students seemed to really like it. On Thursday we were in the language lab and for part of the class students were able to play some “videogames” I found online that practice the grammar skills we had been working with. They seemed to enjoy them. On Friday we used the Clickers again and the students were excited when they walked into class and saw the Clickers sitting out.

I have really been working on my pacing and including a variety of activities within a class period. I was the pacing of the class to feel as though “it went by quickly” for the students. I don’t want them to be sitting in their desks with bored looks on their faces and eyes glancing at the clock every minute. So for now, my challenge is to make the class as interesting to 15 year olds as I can. I try to do 4-5 activities in a normal class period to keep things moving. Also, by including technology, songs, relating the material to their lives/pop culture I think I have been getting better at this. Of course, there will always been some students who choose to not be engaged, but I am trying hard to reach all students.