Kamile: Reflection (20.11.2012)

Kamile: Reflection (20.11.2012)

It was a tiring day. I was with my worse class who were chatting in turkish all the time. This really makes me demotivated. After we covered the reading text in the course book we had a true-false activity about the reading text.Later, we dealt with our new grammar topic ''gerunds& infinitives''. As you all know it is a confusing subject for the students.I provided them with examples to make the topic clear.After I explained the topic clearly I think they understood it. Then, we had a quiz. It was a bit difficult for me to try to attract my students' attention to the lesson because of my terrible toothache:(

ISIK - REFLECTION (19/11/12)

 Today the classes started in a positive way and i can say that it went same all day. I wore red today and my students told me that i looked nice and this created somehow energy in the classroom atmosphere. I felt motivated and they felt inspired, it was weird it was as if the power of red affected all of us :) we did speaking a lot, but i realized that the same activity could work in one class and not work in another class. With my main class, i haven't been able to do speaking a lot, most of them are passive receivers, but with other class, we havew been ablo to speak more. Another interesting thing happened today was that during the break one of the students came totell me that some of the students in class really bother him since they talked a lot and they distract his attention to the lesson, he asked me to warn them more. However, the problem is I warn them almost every 30seconds sometimes and i am not sure what else i can do. i just feel like Fatih Terim, what can i do sometimes? :)

Kamile: Reflection (19.11.2012)

Kamile: Reflection (19.11.2012)

Today was really different. I had a video class today and my students were quite different during the recording. Actually, they asked me the reason why we recorded the class and I told them that as they made me unhappy I wanted a recording and they believed that!! They decided to be hardworking students. They were much more silent and participative than normal so we had a satisfactory lesson. After the video class they continued to be energetic.Of course, I had some students sleeping as normal but it was not a big problem.Actually, today's only problem was by terrible toothache so İt was a difficult day for me.
When it comes to the classes we studied on a reading about which I provided pictures and a video for my students.We had lots of speaking activity about the topic of the reading because the topic was really enjoyable and appropriate for disscussion...

Sedef: Reflection_9

Today I had a problem with one of my students. Actually that was not a big deal but still made me unhappy. The topic was 'appearance' and the vocabulary included some adjectives such as blonde, fat, overweight, slim etc. or some nouns like beard, moustache etc. One student in the classroom always complains of some things. I was trying to teach the vocabulary making the students in the classroom stand up and I showed their hair, eyes etc. (curly, wavy...) I heard him saying what we will do with this information, it doesn't have any use for us. He also wanted me to hear it. This was not the first attitude of him towards me and the lesson. He demotivates both me and the other students in the classroom. I couldn't know how to react. This was the only problem and it was OK for the other lessons.

16.11.12

So... Got a headband, Allison's sunglasses, and a backpack and walked into class. My students flipped! One thumbs up for getting their attention. The unit was Travel Partners, so I taught them some vocab like "backpacker" and stuff, then we studied the comparatives, using some not so much fun travel vocab, comparing transportation, accommodation and what not. Then I gave them some more fun statements to compare (such as "coming to school and going out with your boy/girlfriend) which went quite well. I'd just put on my sunglasses (well, Allison's sunglasses) and shout "HELLO!" to get their attention. Helped a lot really. Aaaaand another really good thing (thanks to Merve) was the coffee ticket competition activity. Merve gave me these statements (like London's population: something something, Paris' population: something something. And there was the adjective the students were supposed to use: crowded), there were 10 of them. We formed 7 groups of 4, each group got 10 statements, and they were supposed to write full sentences with no mistakes for each statement, and stick them on the board. After they were done writing and sticking, we went over the sentences one by one, at each mistake moving onto another group. We had two winner teams. They had so much fun, all of them were taking pictures of the board after we were done going over the grammar points.

The downer of the day was that it's really difficult to keep up with the book and teach all the grammar points, still struggling with that. And the computers in the classes aren't working so well, took ages to do a couple of listening activities. All in all, it wasn't an awful day. And they were in a good mood because their writing exams went well (so they thought at least).

Kamile: Reflection (16.11.2012)

Kamile: Reflection (16.11.2012)

It was a really tiring day. After the exam my students are generally too distracted and it was difficult to keep trying to teach them something.In the first two hours I was with one of my classes and we studied on writing. I provided them with an example of application letter and CV. After they had an idea about an application letter I wanted them to apply for a job by writing an application letter as a homework. In the last three hours I was with my other class who were as distracted as the others.In this class I provided some new vocabularies about relationships and feelings. Then we had a reading text with questions and event-ordering activity. During the whole lessons I had just two students who tried to learn something, which was really annoying.Some of the others were sleeping and some were chatting. I think as they had easy MMTs they started to feel much more relaxed. I really don't know what to do with such careless and unrespectful students. I feel really tired of having such classes...

Sedef: Reflection_8

Today, we covered superlative forms and giving directions. The students were really attentive and interested in the lesson. We could listen to the dialogues in the coursebook. Then we had fun while practising the phrases used when asked 'Can you tell me the way to ...? ' I told them to choose someone in the classroom and then an object. the student gave the directions for the other student to find the object in the classroom. It was really funny because some students changed the activity a little bit and made his/her friend stand up, go around the classroom by giving directions and sit down the same place without making any objects found :)
The computer was working well, my students were participative in the activities so I was content with the lessons today.