Sedef: Reflection_5

I am just content with the things that we did in the classroom today. My students were really participative and they enjoyed the classroom activities of mine. the structure was new, the unit was new and they were just fresh in the morning.
First I started with some wellknown famous people like Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Timberlake, Sting etc. I had prepared a ppt using these celebrities. First I elicited students' answers about who these people are and then I asked about their opinions after each famous person what was their job in the past. I listened to their predictions and then I showed the slide on which celbrities' names and some jobs are written. I wanted them to work in pairs and match the names with the jobs. It was fun for the students as the jobs were unexpected such as a bricklayer, a toy shop assitant, or a hospital worker. Then I went on showing the slides on which the sentences like "Sting was a bricklayer in the past." As you already understand, the slides had both 'was/were' sentences and the answers of matching activity at the same time. After practising 'was/were' with some exercises in the book, I delivered to them seperate pieces of a reading passage. The sentences or the paragraphes had sentences written in simple past tense (regular verbs). They put them in order and underlined the verbs in the sentences, which aims to raise the students' awareness on the target structure. Then we worked on the sentences asking and answering lots of questions about them. In that way, sts started to make sentences with regular verbs in the past tense. Then there was another 'putting in order activity', but this time they were pictures and there were only phrases. That's why, the sts needed to make sentences using the phrases given. This enhanced the autonomy in the new structure step by step. They enjoyed all the activities and they were eager to contribute to the lesson.
However, in the other classroom, it wasn't the case. I couldn't apply my activities there as the main teacher covered them in her own way. We also had a quiz, so the students made it difficult to cover the things that I thought. We could only focus on question sentence formation in past tense, and their comments were invaluable for me. They indicated that they had never understood  that well:) The computer was problematic in my classrooms as well, but anyway it was a productive day.
Sedef