Microteaching

Hello again! After a month without posting anything, I'm back with new knowledge acquired and new ideas I would like to share with you.

On December, we've been doing the microteaching of the projects we've been working on. For me, sharing some parts of our projects with the whole class has been a great experience and it has also been very helpful in order to see ourselves conducting an activity as if we were doing it in front of real primary students (although, I have to say it was a bit difficult to imagine our classmates as little children and I'm sure we'll do it more natural in a real situation). By doing the microteaching, I have been aware of many aspects that we have to consider when preparing a lesson so that it goes well and according to what we've planned.

First of all, we have to bear in mind the speed in which we are talking to kids. In general, even when we are speaking Catalan with our students, it's important to speak calmly in order for the children to follow better what we are saying, and that, of course, is even more important when talking in English, as it is not their mother tongue and it may cause extra difficulties to understand. Related to the speed it's the rhythm. By making pauses or silences while we speak we are also emphasising parts of our speech and that makes it easier for children to focus their attention on the aspects we want them to do so. Apart from talking slowly and with adequate pauses, gesturing a lot can really help children to get what we're saying because, even if they don't understand a word, they can deduce its meaning from the gestures we do to accompany it. Finally, the intonation and the volume of which we speak can help us make the students notice which parts are more important of what we are saying (if we put special emphasis on them by increasing the tone of voice when saying them), or we can also play with this aspect of the oral language by whispering to children some "secret" information, exaggerating the intonation when asking them questions, ...etc.  

Modeling is also an essential resource to use when explaining activities. Sometimes, the instructions of an activity can be long or a little bit difficult to understand. By showing children an example of how to do the exercise before doing it, they can feel more secure and confident by checking if they understood the instructions or completing some parts that they didn't get at the beginning of the explanation.

After modeling, it is a good moment to let students ask for clarifications about what do they have to do and also to check for their understanding of the activity. Make sure that the students have understood everything they have to do is necessary for the correct development of the exercise and for their learning. As my group and I did in our microteaching, we think it's important not just to ask children "Have you understood the activity?", because we think this is a too general question that doesn't guarantee their comprehension. Instead of that, we thought about the key information that children should remember from the activity we just explained and then we asked them more concrete questions related to that information. For example, in one of the activities that we did, students had to draw a circle with a blue pencil, and that was a key information they had to remember so, we asked them: which color do you have to use? What do you have to draw? So students remind this specific information and we make sure they understand it.

In relation to checking for children's comprehension, we have to take into account that, of course, they will commit some mistakes. As teachers, we should see these mistakes as opportunities we have to increase children's learning and, instead of trying to avoid them, take as much profit as we can from them. To do so, we have to get used to being spontaneous and quick-thinkers to integrate these unexpected facts to the lesson. For example, when we did our microteaching, one activity consisted of making the children write the name of a transport they knew in a white piece of paper. When we use those papers, in one of them it was written "tree", which obviously was not a transport. In that case we could have said something like "Oh, that's not a transport!" and get rid of that paper, but instead, we ask the students what was a tree, one child draw it on the board, ... so they learned a new word even though it was not related to our topic.

Continuing with the importance of mistakes, it is very common that children produce in a wrong way some grammatical aspects of the language when they start speaking it. Instead of telling them that they said "that" wrong, it's better to rephrase what they said in a good way and make them repeat it correctly.

Moreover, having a visual support with key information on it all the time can be very helpful for children too. What we can write on this visual support (such as the board) could be the steps they have to follow to do an activity, some grammar structures they have to use to write something, key vocabulary, ... etc. This way, if they forget something they can check it themselves on the board without having to ask the teacher for it and they will become more autonomous, which at the same time will increase their self-esteem as they will feel more capable and competent to do things themselves.

Same way, it's better to use children's own productions than "stereotype" draws or pictures. If we use our student's representations, it will be more enriching because everybody will have its own and unique material! That will increase children's creativity and self-esteem as well because they will feel we value their productions. Of course, it will also be more meaningful for their learning.

Furthermore, we should try to create material that students can work with more than for just a concrete an independent activity. What I mean by saying this is that, if we give a different worksheet to the students for each activity and each part of the project we want to do, they will work on it for a very short period and they won't see it again, so actually it won't be very meaningful for them because they will see it only once and then forget it. To avoid this, we should try to take as much profit from one worksheet as we can by working on it from different aspects of the topic, doing more than one activity, or at least review it and talk about it more than just once. What it's important is not the number of worksheets our students do, but the quality of them.

To make possible this deeper use of the material, it's necessary that the activities we design are well linked and connected between each other. If we follow a logical order of the activities, the ones from the beginning will be useful for the middle ones and the final tasks will integrate all of them. This way, students will establish meaningful connections between different knowledge and build it step by step.

Regarding class management, we have seen that using rhymes is a very effective way of catching children's attention whenever we want. I liked a lot the idea of the "Food" topic group that created their own rhyme according to their theme, including some specific vocabulary of food on it. This is an easy resource to create and children love taking part of these little activities that they master.

The way of doing groups, as we have already seen in many sessions, it's also an aspect to consider when planning a lesson. We have many different ways of doing this and we should try to combine them as much as possible because through that we can work on very different aspects such as mathematics, finding similarities, descriptions, ...etc. Making groups could also be an activity itself and not just a situation of transfer to another activity.

Finally, the end of a session is not less important than its beginning. We always have to think about a way of closing the lesson. As we have seen in some of the microteaching that we've done, a good way of doing it is by asking questions to students in relation to what they've done, for example: what did you like the most today? Have you learned something new? Tell me just a word that describes the session of today, …etc. By doing this, students will refresh everything we've done in class and they'll be more aware of their feelings and learning.

To conclude, as you have seen, preparing a lesson it's a lot more complicated than it seems because it includes many aspects apart from just designing the materials, which is also not that easy. With this post, I hope you have seen some key aspects that help you improve your practice as a teacher. As far as I'm concerned, I will try to always have in mind as many aspects as I can in my future lessons so that students learn a lot but also have a lot of fun doing it.

English Maths

Maths are a great subject to work with CLIL! That's the conclusion to which I arrived after sawing a lot of examples of activities we can do to make our children learn maths in English in a funny and meaningful way. But in order to do maths in English, we have to consider that we have to introduce the concepts and skills one year after children have done it in their L1.

Why don't start by singing the song "Number Rhymes"? While it explains the story of a boy who caught a fish that bites him and that's why he let it go again in the water, children will be counting till number ten. This song attracts children's attention quickly as it is funny and the lyrics are easy to learn and mimic. It is a good way not only to introduce the numbers to the youngest students, but also a way to get their attention back when they are tired or distracted. The song and its video can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJEfDdaGN0

The "Ten Frame" is another useful resource to practise the numbers in English and some operations such as addition, subtraction, ...etc. It consists of a frame made of 2 rows, each one divided into 5 squares making a total of 10 squares. It's important that the squares in total are 10 because it is a key number that allows students count in tenths and make them see that if 3 + 3 makes 6, 30 +30 makes 60, 300 + 300 makes 600 and so on, so that they only have to add a 0 at the end. Also, the fact that it is divided into 2 rows of 5 is key too. 5 is the number they can represent with their own hand and it will be easier for them to do both additions and subtractions because they will have in mind that 1 row is equal to 5, so that they only have to add the filled squares of the other row instead of having to count all the squares one by one. The frame is completed with the pictures of apples (or everything else) that you can hook in the frame to play with it.

With this frame, you can start doing simple activities such as make the children count out loud while you add an apple at a time. You can make them count forward or backward.

Also, if you have apples of different colours, you can make more complex activities. For instance, you can ask children "How many apples can you see?" while you add or remove apples of a different colour than the ones that were already hooked (if there were 2 red apples, you can add 3 green apples making a total of 5 apples). You can also ask children for the opposite "How many squares are empty?" or make them come to the board and tell them how many apples they have to add or remove "Take out 3 apples. How many apples do we have now?". By these exercises, children will be doing simple additions and subtractions. To see another representation, you can also place the apples bearing in mind the organization of a dice.

Once the children master how the "Ten frame" works because we would have been playing with it all together, it is a good idea to give individual little frames to each child or make them work in pairs. In this way, we will respect the different learning rhythms of the class and we will ensure that every kid has the opportunity to play with the "Ten frame". We can also do the same "individual work" in a more interactive way with computers as the "Ten frame" is available on a website that allows students to play with it online: http://www.nctm.org/Classroom-Resources/Interactives/Ten-Frame/

Another activity we can do to practise counting the number out loud could be "The Banana number". In this activity, you can make children count in fives and the number that would be the "5" of a round doesn't have to be said and instead, children have to say "banana". For example, they will start saying 1, 2, 3, 4, banana! 6, 7, 8, 9, banana!, 11, 12, 13, 14, banana! ... You can make them count in threes, in tens, ...etc.

Same kind of activity could be to make students count from one number to another forward and backward. With these type of exercises in which everybody participates, it is common that questions such as "Which / Who's turn is it?" appear. That helps children learn language structures at the same time they are practising maths.

Finding the highest or smallest number of a set is also a fun activity we can do. The teacher can write some numbers on the board, let children look at them during a minute, remove them from the board and finally ask them "Who can tell me which was the highest / smallest number of the set?". We can also do it with even or odd numbers.

To say the number that comes after or before is another example of activity. The numbers we choose doesn't have to be random. Numbers such as 409, 369, 3999, ... make children change the tens, the hundreds or even the thousands' units and that is more challenging than just saying the next number of the previous one. That can be also applied to the activity of saying the number between two numbers (5 - 6 / 21 - 30 ...) or the one in which they have to round numbers to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand.

Finally, there are different activities included in the type of "Write the answers on your chart". These activities are focused on working the mental arithmetic because children don't have to write the operation they do to get to the result and they just have to write the result (except for the children that have some difficulties in mathematics). In these activities, the question "Can you repeat, please?" is frequently asked because the orders are given orally instead of written.

The first activity that we did in relation to this kind was a "Set of sums". We design a grid made of 2 columns of 5 squares each one. The first column was for subtractions and the second one for multiplications. In the first column we saw specific vocabulary when talking about subtractions: take away and minus; and in the second column about multiplications: "x" times and by.

When correcting this activity, students have to make a tick if they get it right and a cross (and write the correct answer) if they get it wrong. The teacher can ask "Who wants to tell me the next result?" and also make them count how many ticks did they get and then ask them: "If you have all questions right, how many ticks will you have?" or if a student got 2 answers wrong, we could ask him "Why did you get 2 wrong answers?" and they quickly learn to say "I made a mistake / I didn't listen properly / I didn't understand it ...".

The last activity we did was about "problems resolution". Again, students should only write the result of the activity without the operation they do. In this case, it is important that students write what the number of the solution refers to. For instance, if the problem is talking about how many books a girl bought in a shop, the result should be "X" books. Having to write these words may provoke children to ask "How can we write .....?". Also, considering that the problem is only said out loud, it's very helpful if the teacher mimes a lot while she's reading the problem in order for the children to understand better the situation. 

Depending on the type of problems, you can introduce mathematical concepts such as half and whole (we did a problem that consisted on knowing how many whole apples will we get if we have 5 half apples). Also, when we correct the problems, it is interesting to ask children "How did you get to that result?" so that they do the effort to put in words the process they did in their mind. To do so, it's important that the teacher give them keys to explain the process: first, .... second / then, .... finally, ...

To end up with this post, as you have seen in the multiple examples explained above, there are many possibilities to do maths in English and by working on them, children not only develop their maths skills, but they also learn mathematic vocabulary and new English language structures that they will be able to use in other contexts as well.

Teaching language skills

Both as children and as future teacher's students, we all have heard about the language skills in English at some point, but on the last university lesson, we went a little bit deeper in this theme and we saw the relation between them, its implementation, and some more characteristics that I'm going to explain in today's post.

To have it clear from the very beginning, the four language skills are: speaking, reading, listening and writing. They can be classified regarding different aspects:

• When talking about the direction of communication, we found the productive skills (speaking and writing), and the receptive skills (listening and reading).
• Considering the mode of communication, we divided them into oral skills (speaking and listening), and written skills (reading and writing).

Although each skill has its own characteristics, they are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, some of them are strongly related as we could see below and this means that to teach them, we must take advantage of one skill to develop another one so that we combine activities involving different skills that are linked:

• Speaking, for instance, is necessary to write properly; if our children aren't able to organize their ideas while explaining them out loud, their writings will be also messy and incoherent. We should practise their speaking abilities in order to improve their writings too.
• Again, speaking is also very close to reading. If the students can pronounce the words correctly while they speak, it will be easier for them to have a good pronunciation as well when they read.
• Have a good listening skill can help the reading and speaking too, as it is necessary that students identify how the words sound to read and say them properly. It is important for students to have heard how to pronounce the words they are going to read in a text before doing it.
• Finally, the writing and the reading are also very related because students learn them simultaneously, although it is true that to write, it is necessary to know how to read because you should identify the graphic of a letter to write it. Also, a good way to start writing in English is by copying the words already written so that thanks to this repetition they will integrate how to write them.

Now that we have clear which skills does English have and how are they related to each other, we should ask ourselves which is the best way to teach them. As we have already said, some skills can't be understood without another so, bearing this in mind, the common steps to teach them are the following ones:

1. Listening and Speaking = the oral skills are the first ones learned by students and they should do it at the same time.
2. Reading and Writing = the written skills are the second ones learned as they are a little bit more complex and take more time to be mastered. They are, as well, learned simultaneously.

These steps are almost the same when learning the L1 and that's why we should always respect the natural way that children learn their first language to teach the second one effectively.

Besides most of the children learn the skills in the order mention before, we should know that some of them will suffer the "Silent-way".

This period happens when a new item or message is understood but learners aren't still able to produce it. As we saw in class, first the students will be able to understand the new item before they are able to produce it and use it in communication. The difference between being able to understand an item and being able to produce it is known as passive knowledge versus active knowledge. Teachers shouldn't force their students to skip the step of passive knowledge in order to produce texts and discourses faster because children can feel very pressure and that could block them even more. We should respect student's different pace to develop their skills by presenting material that doesn't require the students to respond verbally but allows them to show comprehension.

As a conclusion, we could say that teachers should always be aware that language has to be used in a communicative way and to do so, we must integrate all the skills in a natural way, what it is called "realistic communication". To do so, it is important to expose learners to a large amount of material (pictures, videos, songs, text...) using the new item, before they are able to employ it in communication because, as we have already explained, first learners absorb the new item on an unconscious level and after some time, they will be able to use it in a natural way.