Training Week 7

This week we have been asked to progress our more advanced students to a point where they feel able to write a story about their personal journey to the UK. This presented its own challenges to our teaching group. We were paired up and asked to cover several topics, including a lesson designed to teach vocabulary relating to comparison and emotion; a grammar lesson teaching quantifiers, comparatives and superlatives e.g. many, more, most;  and then our bit, how to bring all this and the information from previous lessons together to create a story. 

My partner and I prepared a piece describing what an autobiography is and the sort of information that might be included in it, as well as a suggested structure that our students might follow. We each took turns to give our students information about our own journeys to Kingston, mine all the way from Glasgow on an rather shabby overnight bus in the '90s and Tatiana's rather more glamorous flight from Brazil earlier this year. This personal touch seemed to engage our students and encourage them to volunteer ideas and to make a positive start on writing their own stories. 

In our feedback session, our tutor Veronica observed that we had all demonstrated good progress in our teaching practice over a short period of time. My feeling is that our confidence has increased with every lesson and that a combination of preparation and learning from this time in front of students is indispensable. 

After lunch, once our students had left, we reconvened in the classroom with our tutor Emma who continued last week's theme of literary skills. This week the main focus moved from reading skills to writing skills. It is important for us to understand this as we are likely to come across students with varied levels of ability and we need to understand how to best develop our lesson plans for each individual.