Teaching English as a Second Language?

give eslprintables.com a try!

it's an online community of people teaching english around the world

TEACH in New Zealand

http://www.teachnz.govt.nz/default.aspx

http://www.immigration.govt.nz/nzopportunities/opportunities/teaching/default.htm

My Web Quest

Smoking Kills
this presentation is done in google docs.
I think the webquest works a little better in power point.

Web Quest

What is a WebQuest?
- a lesson in which information comes from the web
- inquiry based - real world problems scaled down so elementary students can come up with solutions
- involves a task
- has students think, process, and do something with the information they learn

- involves higher level thinking
- can be short (one hour) or long (a month long process)
- usually involves group work (not always)
- resources are preselected by teacher


How would I have students use the WebQuest I Created?
The WebQuest I created was on the dangers of smoking. The students in 6th grade would actually put on a campaign to not start smoking. This is an age where many students do start smoking. If students can be convinced at this age, by their peers not to smoke maybe the choice not to start will stick with them. This would be used in a health unit.


What is a WebQuest ?
WebQuest Work Shop
Origin of the WebQuest


Examples:
American Revolution
Transcontinental Rail Road

Field Week Two

Teaching the class for the first time on my own was different. I do not have as much experience with large groups like my partner. I have taught mostly in church with groups of four to eight students. Thirty student makes a big difference. When I had class break off into groups ( 5 different groups) I found it difficult to get around to everyone with questions (luckily I had my partner teacher). From the questions I was asked I determined a few things: 1- my directions were not very clear 2- the prompts I gave the students to draw information from were not clear enough 3- I did not distribute group jobs well, did not explain each position well, and had too many kids in a group.

I had the children work in their table groups since this was easy and the children have already been placed in table groups for efficiency and productivity. The groups were too large. I tried to make sure everyone had something to do by assigning jobs, but a time keeper, although I think is important, was not a job students felt they needed to fulfill, also the speaker and reader tended to zone out of what was going on unless it was their turn to do something and the writer had a very difficult job of writing about what the students illustrated . I should have at least chosen one person from each table to form a 6th group. Looking back it would have been best to have 10 groups of three. Groups of three are much more effective then groups of 6.

Because I had to find a lot of facts about Jim Bridger, some of the facts were not easy enough for the students to understand with out discussing it. I had to clarify what things said and brain storm what the students could say about their prompt (facts) with a few groups. I feel if I had chosen two mountain men (or more) to cover, the students could have been given easy and taught easier information and had wider base of knowledge about individual mountain men who were important in Utah History.

Giving Direction is much harder than I imagined. I need to make sure there is wait time. I need to allow a good amount of time for giving direction. I need to explain it in a few ways. Having direction writing on the board helped too.

Field Week 3

So how I missed that we were supposed to be posting each week we were in the field. So on the 2nd day I wrote one, but saved it as a draft since I didn't think we were supposed to post that on our blog. I have now published it. Hopefully this can count for week three.

Week three was good in the class room. Mostly we were wrapping up the mountain man unit. We reviewed what we had learned about mountain men and we had the kids write a story about mountain men to see what they had learned. we asked them to use 5 vocabulary words. it was interesting to see if they actually understood the vocabulary words or not.

I have to admit the rest of the time we were in field was not as exciting as the first time we taught. The teacher didn't have much for us to do so we ended up observing a lot!

Field Week One

I was so incredibly excited to be a teacher after today's class. IT WAS SOOO MUCH FUN!! I just loved it. I wanted to dance and skip around. We played a vocabulary game (basically charades) today and the kids were SOOOOO into it. And let me just tell you we have like the best class ever. I am serious. There are no behavior problems at all. The teacher agrees that they are basically the best class she has ever had. 4th grade rocks!! they are old enough to be able to do fun things!

There are a few things that would have gone better with today's lesson. First of all we have a poster we put on the board that simpley wasn't big enough for kids in the back of the classroom to read. Also we didn't know the student names yet so that was hard. It was also hard to remember who we had already called on. Some of the words were difficult (rendezvous) but the kids were up to the challege! So far every one did a good job acting out their word. Some of the actions were kimd of small, but learning to be a good actor takes time! It would be so fun to video tape a class doing something like that at the begining of the year and then see them do it again at the end of the year.

team teaching was awesome becuase it broke things up. The kids weren't listening to the same voice the whole time and they got to hear the directions from two different perspectives. I do feel team teaching is difficult however b/c you don't want to step on the other persons foot and it's hard to tell if you are taking over or not sometimes. My partner is really good, she has a lot of experience.

I used proximity praise a lot (I have trained my self to do this) this seemed to work really well on the this group of kids. Tomorrow I want to start taking data for behavior management.

One thing I thought would have been nice for students would be wait time! I could barely keep up with the teacher when she asked questions and sometimes I was behind (of course I haven't been trained on it for the past few months either). She also may have just been doing a good job of making her students pay attention? She may have taught them not to have long pauses before answering. but still wait time would be helpful.