Diary 6: How do I prepare my first day at a new language school and where do I get my ideas from?
What Is a Kinesthetic Learner?"Kinesthetic learning is a learning style of students that learn best by discovering and experiencing. These students prefer physical activities that involve getting out of their seat, moving around and touching thing". This text is written by Fluentu, Fluentu English Educator Blog, in their blog about 6 Hoppin´ ESL Games for Kinesthetic Learners That Love to Move.
There are several useful materials that you can prepare before teaching English on your first day in a new language school. You can use authentic English material, you can create your own material that you like to teach that you for example used in other language schools, you can prepare material that the school is working with or you can work with a mix of everything. It totally depends about the school that you will be teaching at.
When you have to work with material the school is giving you, you have to adapt your ideas and creativity in this substantial concrete structure. When you can improvise and use your own ideas, taking into account that you work with the 4 language skills and their basic learning styles, you can imagine that there is no limit to be conductive and ingenious as much as you can. Hereby I would like to share an example of preparing a class, working with the material of the language school, and an example of preparing a class when I can make it my own.
Consider that I have to use material that the language school is using, how will I prepare this class?
When I prepare a class without material from the language school I will do it as follows:
Preparing for example a conversation class will contain 9 basic rules. As Stacy Levi writes in her article How to teach conversational English is that with whether the conversation is not holding correctly or right, the mean goal is that your fellow student understands you and that your meaning comes through. Also they have to listen to each other, actively by clarifying and asking for examples. Choose a topic for this specific class that they like and make small groups or pairs where there is the possibility to rotate students. Additionally to this the students needs to know how the have an academic conversation and introducing some vocabulary to enter this specific conversation. Don't forget that there is an informal and formal way of having conversations also. Besides this, an important element of teaching in this kind of classes is that you walk around and sit in on conversations to listen if the students are understanding the meaning of having a conversation. Taking this into account I will start preparing the class with looking at the level of the students. I would search for three topics that they like and prepare some examples of conversations about this topic to show in class before they will start. Preparing some words that they have to use and getting to know is important to teach vocabulary. Next to this I would prepare two movement exercises as a filler and mixer for in between that relates to the topic and conversations. In the end there will be a game so that they can show to the other students where the were talking about. For example, if the topic is shopping, i will put the tables to the side and make space for moving. I will put words on the floor and ask them a question about the topic to start a conversation. When somebody starts with answering my question they have to use a word that is written on the ground, they have to go there and when they finished talking they can ask another question to another schoolmate so that he or she can give an answer and go to that place where the word is written on the ground. At the end of the class I would like to resume with the students what they have learned. As a final closer they have to write it on the board or everybody has to say one sentence or word.
We can prepare a class in many different ways and it all depends about the school and the subject that you will teach in your class. When I was writing this diary I got many ideas about preparing a class and I absolutely like to use my imagination, my experience of being a choreographer and filmmaker, my teaching experience of young learners, blogs of experience of other teachers online and the volunteering in the Academia de inglés Valencia Language Club in Catarroja. I have to confess that after writing these 6 diaries and studying the online program of Tefl I gain much more knowledge about teaching, more fun with preparing lessons and realise that what I have learned in the past as a choreographer that It will make my lessons much more interesting for me and I hope for my students too!
Links:
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/esl-games-for-students/
https://busyteacher.org/14409-how-to-teach-conversational-english-best-practices.html