IMPLEMENTING THE UNIT

So... That was the day. At the moment I feel exhausted. It remembers me when I did exams at university. After a whole morning exam I felt really tired and my mind needed a break. I had shown my planning to the teacher and all the material I had prepared: pictures, a poster, activities... She found it very interesting and well organised and that gave me confidence.

When I arrived, I first told them that I would be teaching them English for two weeks. I started with a warming up activity to introduce them the core unit. I took with me the naughtiest boy in the class to help me with some pictures about jobs, so that he was not disrupting my first activity. All students had to recognise the job and they surprised me quite a lot. That first activity was better than I expected so I went on with the core activity. They had to gather in groups of 4 people and read about a character's life: Messi, Ferran Adrià, Shakira and a flight surgeon from NASA. They had to fulfill a poster with basic information: Name, Picture (were given to them), nationality, What is she/he doing now? What can he/She do?... That activity was very tough to be explained. It was very difficult to keep their attention for 5 minutes and classroom configuration was doing things even more difficult (we were in a class with computers). I had prepared roles for them: Dictionary user, Chart filler, Reader, Secretary... But I decided not to use them because it was very difficult for them to understand how to behave. The activity was not yet completed but I decided to stop it because some of the students were not participating and the class was getting out of my control. I asked one person per group to read its part of the chart. I had prepared a chart with the things they told me that they like doing. We commented on that: "Who likes playing football?" And I tried to make them interact with me explaining when, with who...


But that was somehow difficult because of their low level. I still had 10 minutes to finish the class and I started to feel I couldn't anymore. I had to ask for silence every 2 seconds and my voice was starting to feel those 40 minutes of class (1200 silence please!!). I decided to try to summarise the important points of the lesson with them and practise a little bit. We worked doing oral sentences with CAN, CAN't around their favourite leisure activities. And that was it. The bell rang. I need to analyse the class and take into consideration their way of working to readapt the activities I prepared for next week. But I'll do it tomorrow. Today I need to relax... The teacher gave me support but I feel I need to do it much better.