April 27th, 2012
Information on the
observed class:
Courses: Children 2
Teacher: Nadia Barboni
School: Our English World
Number of students: 10
Ages: Between 7 and 8
The class was a short
one; it only lasted one hour and it unfolded in the following way. First, the
teacher said "Hello" and asked the students how they were, initially
in general and then by calling specific students. Right away, the teacher
started correcting homework (practice with the verb "to be" in the
affirmative form): She called on different students to read one sentence each.
The student read their sentence aloud, the teacher repeated it for all students
to hear clearly, and then she moved on to the next sentence. When the student
had not gotten the sentence right, the teacher asked questions (in Spanish) for
them to see the mistake: ¿Por qué decimos
"My father is..." pero decimos "My sisters are..."?.
(Homework was related to "family members" - which included pets,
apparently- and "weather")
After homework-checking
was finished, the "secretary," a student who would help the teacher
in that class, was assigned, and the class went on with further recycling of
the weather. The students had to describe what the day was like, and the
teacher helped them revise the vocabulary by asking questions such as Good, today is cloudy... And is it hot?.
In particular, this exemplary question led to the students remembering the
adjective "cold."
Next, there was a
revision of "parts of the house." Using pictures in the students'
book, the teacher asked the students questions such as En la primera cerradura, ¿qué habitación estamos espiando? or ¿Y
qué hay en la habitación 1? (The students mentioned objects such as
"door", "table", "chair," and a few others).
After this activity,
followed tasks for practicing the "voiced-TH" sound, using the
workbook; and from there, the students had to work on the words
"They," "this," and "there:" they had to write
down sentences using them. This activity and correction took at the rest of the
class; except for the last ten minutes in which the students played
"Hangman" (a vocabulary revision activity disguised as a game).
Both the students and
the teacher used Spanish almost all the time. As regards the pupils,
specifically, they were very distracted the whole of the class, especially the
boys; and they could not help but interrupt the teacher to speak about their
lives: ¡El miércoles es mi cumpleaños!,
¿Quién es el secretario la próxima clase?, Hoy tuvimos una prueba, [Name]
siempre termina primero.
Reflection:
To begin with, I was
reminded of something that I knew but had forgotten: that girls seem to be more
responsible than boys. When the teacher started correcting homework, it turned
out that none of the boys had done it, but the girls had. This realization
serves as an invitation to pay attention, from now on, to the different ways in
which boys and girls are likely to behave in terms of their learning process,
behaviour, types of activities they like, etc.
A further realization
(or confirmation of previous knowledge, at least) was how amazingly
kinaesthetic young children are. The students, who were either 7 or 8 years
old, could not help but keep moving all the time. They were constantly (the
boys in particular) readjusting their position on the desks, taking another
student's pencil or eraser, drawing, moving their feet or passing an object
from one hand to the other. In addition, their attention spans really are
short. They kept attentive to the tasks but only because the teacher was fast
in switching from one activity to the other; if the activity took more than 10
or 15 minutes, the kids would start talking about school, or asking the teacher
irrelevant questions.
Another aspect that
stuck out was each child's need (except for a very shy girl) to be acknowledged
by the teacher. They all seemed to seek her approbation both while on-task and
when they were simply doing something else, like playing.
I also noticed, after
comparing this class with the previous one I observed, that whether the
students speak English or Spanish depends to a great extent on what language
the teacher uses. In the previous class, the students only spoke Spanish when
asking How do you say [Spanish word]?,
and I believe this had everything to do with the fact that the teachers at the
institute spoke English 95 % of the time – even during the break. In this
class, however, in which the teacher used Spanish as the medium of instruction
for teaching English, the students found it natural to simply speak in their
mother tongue.
The need children have
of being repeated and of repeating sentences also became salient. Before the
children could actually keep a particular structure, they needed to repeat the
sentences quite a few times.
Last but not least, I
realized (again after comparing the two classes) that different age groups
really do behave differently, and this reasoning made me think about Piaget's
stages of cognitive development. Even though I could not identify particular
"features" of each stage in the group, I believe that the way
children of different ages behave is evidence that there is some truth to the
theory.
