Eighth Journal

This week was the last class in fifth grade, so my plan was that students could socialize many countries in just one class. So, what I thought was that students worked in groups and each group would be in charge of a country and its culture. And then, each group would socialize their country with their classmates. In that way, all students would learn about the culture of six countries. The objective was that students made a presentation of a country.

So, I organized the students in the group, I gave each group a sheet of paper where contained: the name of the country, the flag, some symbols, and representative thing about the country, also it had written cultural information. The student started to see the paper and read the information. It was easy to read because the correspondent picture was in front of the information. Then, I gave each group a paper bond sheet and they had to create a poster showing the culture of their country.

This activity was great for them because they like drawing and coloring. However, working in groups is difficult for them because they rarely can agree with a classmate. The atmosphere in the classroom was heavy, students were talking loud all the time and they discuss almost yelling. It was frustrated for me because I felt I could not have control of the class.

This week in third grades, students were going to learn about animals and the types of animals according to their habitat. Besides, students had to make short sentences describing the animals. So, as they previously had seen the topic of animals they should know most of them. I showed them pictures of some animals where they just could see the shade of each animal and had to guess what animal it was. This activity was really successful because as I said before, they know many names of animals and recognize them when they see them in pictures.

For knowing the type of animals, I showed a video about aquatic, farm, and wild animals. It explained why they are called so, and showed examples of animals in each category. After watching the video, students had to recall all the animals they watch in the video. This activity was successful since students could remember most of them.

Now, to write the sentences, I made a chart in the board with three aspects (speed, size, and color) I explained each aspect by acting, I run when explaining FAST, I walked too slowly to explain SLOW. I opened my hand big to explain LARGE, and so on. In that way, it was easier for students to know what they meant. At the end of the class, students had to choose an animal they liked and had to make a drawing of it. Also, they had to write four sentences. To do this, I made an example on the board, I chose my animal, I drew it, and I wrote the four sentences. So, it was easy for them to do their own. This class was successful and great because students enjoyed it and were interested in the activities and the topic. What I would change maybe could be the number of animals I showed them because there were like 30 animals, so there were many for students to learn, and remember.