I'm posting this on Friday because I didn't teach until Thursday of this week. For my first graders I prepared a lesson about natural disasters. This is the lesson I transcribed for module 3.
After a quick warm-up wherein I made small talk about the upcoming school sports day, I wrote the lesson topic on the board. After establishing the meaning, I told the students that in their groups I want them to come up with 3 examples of natural disasters plus think about what country it is common in and what kind of damage it causes. I gave them one minute to discuss. After that I asked different members of each group individually to tell me their answers. This means that I asked 3 different students per group. I accepted one word answers for natural disaster name and country but insisted and helped them to formulate a sentence about the damage: ie 'In a tornado the cows fly away'. After writing everything on the board we watched a very exciting 4 minute earthquake clip from the movie 2012.
In the presentation stage I used a ppt showing various natural disasters and had the Ss ask each other questions: 'Which natural disaster is this?', 'What happens?', 'How can you survive?' My students still have trouble formulating sentences on their own so I used copious MIC techniques to help them arrive at 'In an avalanche snow falls down the mountain'.
As an output exercise the students had to fill in the following sentence based on what they learned in the ppt.
Which natural disaster is the most dangerous?
A(n) _________________ is the most dangerous because ________________.
I can survive by ______________________.
As soon as they finished I had them turn their papers over and ask each other the question and answer without reading.
I think the lesson was successful. I structured it well so that the Ss could follow the information. I also like that the questions on the ppt required some independent thinking and sentence creation. Also, the output phase was pretty good. Most Ss were able to do it.
The downside was that this lesson takes a lot out of me. I have to use a lot of body language and other MICs in order to get a decent utterance out of them. Also, I found that when I was busy constructing meaning with one S the others would get restless and noisy. I continuously had to ask them to be quiet. When I'm working so hard it is frustrating to deal with that kind of stuff. But, I have to remember that these boys are only a few months out of middle school and therefore still quite immature. It will be easier to deal with them next year.
Really enjoyed catching up on your blogs today, Mike. Looks like your reflections are helping you understand all this stuff and yourself as a teacher. I share you frustration wrt student chatter among themselves. They still do that when they are teachers in training, unfortunately...
ReplyDelete