CLASS: 9-B

DATE: 11.03.2015  Wednesday

CONTENT OF THE LESSON: Simple Past Tense

OPENING

The activity the teacher used to start to lesson was watching a student’s 

presentation about his dreams for future. The student, Berk, displayed a power point presentation to the classroom about computer engineering. While presenting, the teacher asked some questions to Berk to make incoherent parts about computer engineering. At the end of the presentation the teacher directed a question which was attracted almost all students: “Berk wants to study as computer engineering. What about you?”

One of the students: I want to study at Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty.

Teacher: Why do you want C.M. Faculty instead of ÇAPA?

Student: I don’t know I just want…

Then teacher continued by saying “Forget about the future now, let’s turn present and open your books! Do you want to learn how to use past simple ha?”

Several activities were used to comprehend the usage of past simple construction.

If I scale the opening activity it can be regarded moderately effective for me. Even if the question was not relevant the content of the lesson nearly all students felt motivated thanks to the question.

SEQUENCING

The lesson contained the following sequence of activities:

-         Making some prediction according to the pictures on the book- English for Life

-         Gap-filling activity

Teacher: What can you see in the picture?

Students: There are women and men. They’re talking.

Teacher: Who are they? What are they talking about?

Students: About “yesterday”.

Then teacher make them turned the activity which indicated some verbs with blue. Teacher asked them to explain why the verbs are blue. Some students answered with their reasons then teacher explain in detail past form of “to be” to make it clear. 

  The purpose of sequencing was trying to make the learners realize the rule of past simple indirectly, to get the goal she started from easy activities to difficult ones.

PACING

After making a comparison between “am, is, are” and “was, were” (am-is-are usage is related to present but if you want to talk about 10 years ago, for instance I have to say: I was a student, but NOW in present I am a teacher.) teacher selected students from the list randomly.

-         Hatice, where are you NOW? (with making stress on the word-now-)

-         I am at school.

-         So, where were you last night?

-         I was at home.

Then she said that she did not want to explain the form, instead of that, “let’s examine the examples.”

“We’re at the theatre last night.”

-         Hande, could you make the sentence negative?

The purpose of pacing the lesson in this way: Consolidation the lesson by giving exercises appropriate for the learners’ level.

CLOSURE

The activity teacher used to end the lesson was focusing on listening and speaking skills.

The teacher asked that if the students had any problem about “was & were” or not. Then she selected a student randomly again:

-         Samet, were you out last weekend?

-         No, I was not.

-         Where were you?

-         At home.

-         Could you make it a long sentence?

-         I was at home.

Teacher asked several questions until being sure of that all students understand the content.

When they wanted to do listening exercise, a technical problem occurred. The teacher had to read the text by herself and the students filled the gaps. Teacher read the sentences in the bubble and stopped when there was an unknown phrase.

The effectiveness of this closure was very effective in terms of that the students had no question on their mind about the lesson. On the other hand if the smart board worked, the listening part could be better for students.

New Term Has Started!

MARCH 11, 2015

Today I’ve joined counseling course of 9/E.

The aim of the lesson was to remove the students’ worries about the exam.

The teacher talked about quizzes which were scored last week after that she gave out the papers without declaring the grades.

She emphasized that the writing part was not so good, she warned them kindly about paying attention to grammar mistakes. (She cared about almost all students’ mistakes. Also she gave praises like “best writing was hers, congratulations”, “yours was good but too short”…)

“It is understood that you comprehend the book but you could not express yourselves exactly on the paper.” (She wanted the students to be aware of deficient points.)

The teacher gave them five minutes to check their exam paper if there is any mistakes or not.

Some questions related to grammar were answered again by the students and teacher showed the mistakes which were made in general. (Mistakes were made while mixing the tenses and they were related to using adjectives)

“There are some general mistakes that you did on the quiz, look at the board: a very hard working student-I very love you. Which one is true? ‘Very’ means ‘çok’ but we cannot use it before verbs we use it before adjectives. (She mentioned about how to use adjectives in a sentence again.)”

She wrote another mistake on the board and asked the students to make it correct. “He was comed to the classroom.” The corrections from the students were:

-He did came to the classroom.

-He camed to the classroom.

-He came to the classroom.

At the end of the lesson teacher asked that if there is question or not. No one had any problem. She explained that she could give some projects as supplementary for grammar. Then, the papers were collected. 

A Late Post

*Actually I wrote this blog on December 26th, 2014 but I could not upload the videos due to some technical problems. Hence, I called the title "a late post". :)

We came to an end for presentation tasks. 

Ms. Usta picked up the students who are ready for making their presentations and they showed their own products one by one.

Do not worry! I shot their videos with my cell phone. :) 

Cem was the first student who exhibited his task. The topic was "Spartacus". (I realized that students generally chose tv series as a topic to present.)

After his performance, the teacher asked him to sum up the presentation at least five sentences. And she directed a question to the class: "Do you have any questions?" (They did not ask anything.)

The second presenter was a group. Their topic was "Pole Animals" which was really interesting for everyone. I liked this group's performance since they use their own sentences in the presentation.

Three students told about three different pole animals: Emperor Penguins, Polar Bears, Seal and Sea Lion.

Here are the videos:

After that video, the classroom discussed about the meaning of "approximately".

And the teacher asked the student to answer :"What did you learn from this presentation?"

He said that "I've learnt a lot about penguins. I did not any idea about their kilograms or features of their wings. 

As for me, I have learnt a lot also about Mr. Bean. (I would like to thank the students for their presentations.)