Reflections....

As I sit back tonight and watch a video of myself teaching, which is actually getting easier to do each time and I'm becoming more critical of myself, I am proud of what I have achieved over the past few weeks. Let me explain the classroom interactions techniques that I have added to my classroom discourse.

My main goal overall is to reduce my t-talk to a minimum, sometimes it's hard because I teach 6 year old students so I don't see myself only saying 2 sentences in between each student interaction but i'm trying my best to keep it at a minimum.

Monday morning I remembered that on Saturday Tom had passed a comment on how most us don't use individual nomination. I made sure that in the class I specifically called on students to answer questions. Apparently i'm a big fan of choral repetition so I've noticed. This time I did a round of choral repetition while holding my flashcards then I asked each student individually what was on the flashcard. Oh yeah I started using flashcards instead of pointing in the book, way more effective!!

T: S.J (showing him a flashcard)
S.J: A milkshake

T: Sunny (showing her a flashcard)
Sunny: A sandwich

That's how it went until I had asked all of my students. For my next activity, I spread all of the flashcards on the table and by modelling an example for the students  I said to them

T: You stand here and you choose a card and you say "I want pizza" and then you take something you don't want and say " I don't want rice" ok can you do that?

Ss: Yes!!!

T: Raise your hand who wants to go first?

I invited a student to bid by raising his hand and then after he was finished I individually nominated students until the whole class had done one example.

Next up, there was an activity in the book that required the students to pair up and ask each other questions. Before I started this class, I probably would of skipped that example either because I thought it would take too much time or because I thought my students wouldn't be able to accomplish the task. I'm not going to lie but I used to think that it would be stressful for me to get the task accomplished by everyone. I'm realizing now that good instructions and modelling are key to the success of an activity like this. The first few times it can feel like a disaster but after completing a few exercises both the students and I felt much more comfortable with such a task.

I took the time to explain the chart on the whiteboard and then did an example for them with my student S.J.
I paired them up and off they went on their own. I was surprised to see that most of them were able to do the task on their own. That gave me the opportunity to help the few that were having trouble. I felt really great that this week went by so well.

Then today I was able to see all our hard work payoff. I had telephone English with them, where I call them over the phone and we talk for a few minutes. They were able to answer my questions without hesitation and they were capable of formulating their own questions for me!!!