The importance of little details

This week we have officially started the lessons of the subject "Didàctica de la llengua anglesa". After a short presentation of some of the tasks that we are going to work on during this semester, we started to do some activities that have already given me a first impression of this subject.

To begin with, one of the things I would like to highlight about Monday's lesson is the ease to include other areas in the English subject in a manner that kids not even notice that they are working on them although they actually are. I noticed that point when we were organizing ourselves in groups in order to make an activity. Instead of just letting us deciding the groups without even think about it, our teacher counted how many students we were in the classroom and according to that, she made us calculate how many groups we were going to do and of how many people each one. It was a quick and easy exercise that made us think mathematically in English.

After the short mathematic exercise, in order to divide us, each of us had to say a number out loud and that was going to be our group. In this point, the teacher emphasized on giving clear instructions to the kids in order for them to follow easily what we're doing in the class. In this case, it was important to remember the number said out loud for creating the groups and children has to know that. Moreover, it was also important to check if everybody was understanding what we were doing by asking it and doing the division slowly, for example making raise the hands of each number one by one so that children could see the members of their group easily.

In this point of the class, I had already noticed that we were going to work on this kind of details that will really help us taking a good control of the class and make the students feel confident and comfortable.

Another resource I learned on Monday's lesson was how to make the students pay attention to what's going on in the class. After discussing three questions with our group, we had to put in common the final ideas with the rest of the class and, to ensure that everybody was listening to every group, the teacher told us that if one of the ideas that we had in our group had been said by another group before, we wouldn't need to repeat it. She also pointed out the relevance to check if everybody could hear properly, because in the wrong case, it would be more difficult to pay attention. By sharing the answers to the questions with the hole class I saw new points of view and also common things between us although we don't know each other that much yet.

Furthermore, about Friday's lesson I would like to dwell on the song called "Wind the bobbin up" that our teacher showed us. At the beginning I felt a bit shy playing the choreography of the song, but then we started talking about how we could take profit of this song and it became very interesting. I loved the idea about making children change the lyrics of the song, or the idea that the teacher doesn't sing some key words of the song and kids have to fill in the gaps instead. In my opinion, this kind of activities are very useful in order to break a little bit the routine of the class, especially when students have been doing long and hard exercises and they need to move and disconnect for a moment, although they will keep practising English skills but in a more unawareness way.

To end up this first post of my blog, I would like to explain the last activity we did this week. In little groups, we had to comment on two sentences related to the education field. Our group chose as the most relevant sentence the following one: "They see little purpose in studying sentences that do not make sense in their world, yet they do understand the purposes of language to communicate, identify, persuade or find solutions". We all agreed that as a teachers, we should always provide children a meaningful context of the activities we present to them according to the real and daily situations that they can live. In this way, they will understand much better the purposes of learning a language and they will be more engaged to it.

Finally, until now I can say that I really like the fact that we do the activities for the children as if we were them. In this manner, we experiment the way they can feel in first person, at least for me, the learning is more meaningful.