First Journal

To start, it is necessary to say that I teach three different courses weekly, two courses of third grade, and one of fifth grade. I consider the classes I taught this week were pretty successful since all students were interested in the class and all of them wanted to participate in every activity.

In fifth grade, I taught about the different kind of animals, my plan was teaching them the three types of animals (farm, wild, and aquatic animals). I wanted them to work in groups during all the class, and each group had to be in charge of a group of animals, this strategy was really successful because students improved their cooperative work and their communication skills. In order to make them write short sentences describing animals, I told them to put the adjectives in the correct category (speed, color, size, and shape). This task was done in the board, but before that, they had to do it in their notebook; I consider this the strategy was great since first, they tried to do it themselves and with their classmates but when we did it in the board was whole class feedback in which the students themselves made the corrections.

The classes I taught in third grades were about learning different fruits. My plan was to show to the student the fruits vocabulary through a video, in this way they were able to learn the oral and written form of the new vocabulary. Besides, we played a game called The Fruit Shop, students could touch the fruits and play using the vocabulary. They enjoyed a lot this game because this was something new for them.

The thing that I would change if I had to teach these classes, would be my tone of voice because I consider that sometimes I had to almost yell the students to make silence. I think that I have to find a way to make them be silenced in specific moments of the class without yelling.

In conclusion, I learned that using group work activities develops students’ communicative skills and allows them to learn in a more efficient way. However, as the teacher I have to learn that in this kind of activities is permitted that students talk since sometimes I felt angry because that there was so much noisy in the classroom.  Create spaces in which students can interchange information to complete a task is one of the most important parts of a class, and I will continue improving this learning strategy. On the other hand, using real objects in the classroom allows student to have a more significant learning, this is a very successful way to teach when we lead with children since they like play a lot, so that they can play and learn at the same time.