笔记百科英语教学反思
Reflection on my demo class
By Melody
It was my great honor to have given this demo class. And I also have experienced stress and pressure. Though it has been a long time since I delivered this lesson, I still feel excitement every time I recall it. Thanks to Miss Guo for her pertinent comments, Danfer’s excellent suggestions, my colleagues’ support and kids’ wonderful performance.
All the kids were happy in this class, they learned the words of foods and the sentence patterns : “What do you want?” “Do you want …” “Yes, I do. No, I don’t.” Most of the kids behaved naturally and they didn’t have stage fright at all. But there were still some aspects that could be improved.
(1) The teaching procedure was a little disordered. It didn’t go smoothly. It would be better if I changed the orders of steps. Firstly, sing the song “Lunch time”, ”To the restaurant”, “Do you want coffee” , then practice the sentence patterns in a meaningful context. I could have created simulation situations for them to practice.
For example, I could decorate the classroom into a restaurant situation and prepare some waiter’s hat, gloves etc. Thus students could act as customers and waiter/waitress and use the language in the “restaurant”. This way we prepare them to use English outside classroom and in real life situations. That would be more practical and effective and dynamic.
(2) The part of show time My objective was to make the students show as much as they can. I gave them a stage to show. In this part students prepared on their own without teacher’s help. But when they were on the stage they couldn’t act it out completely because of the little host’s nervousness and we ran out of time.
Danfer’s Notes: Preparing, conducting and looking back at the lesson is a process of self-inquiry and a journey of discovery. I am sure you have wonderful experience.
Learning from my students
By Vivien
The little students always give me surprises, some of them are very clever, may be they have language talent. I thought they are too young to remember complex language points, so I usually teach the words separately and never related to other words.
But yesterday they taught me a lesson. When I was trying to teach the word “glass”, I explained: “The pepper is hot, so brother wants to drink water with the glass.” I thought it’s the best way to remember the word by emphasizing the phonics. That is to say, to get them to observe the relationship of how a word is pronounced and how it is spelled.
To my surprise, one little girl put up her hand and said: “I have something to say!” “Ok!” “The word it’s similar to glasses.” Oh dear, I forgot they have learned “glasses”. And the next word “dish”, they found it look similar to “fish”, so we said together: “Fish in the dish! “ I learned a lot from my lovely students.
Danfer’s Notes: That was an excellent example of building new learning on what they already know, their prior knowledge and life experience. You should thank her. That’s also the basic notion of constructivism.
