First teaching practicum, second period

I already made my first teaching practicum from this second period, and I think that this time everything was different. As I promised to myself, I gave brief explanations, and I tried to make gestures in order to be understood, and it worked. This is what I really liked from this class that everything was clear enough, and I could do my job in an excellent way.

Well, my topic was about quantifiers. As a review, I started my class with a “Hot potatoes activity” in which students have to pass it, and when I paused the song, the one who got the hot potatoes had to say a sentence using there is and there are. Then, I divided the board in two parts.  In one part I wrote countable nouns, and in the other part I wrote uncountable nouns. I gave a brief explanation about it. Then, I gave them a piece of paper with a word on it. In these pieces of paper I had some countable and uncountable nouns, and what they had to do is to classify which were countable nouns and which were uncountable nouns.

Unfortunately, they did it well, and I did not have problems with it. Then, I started to explain the different quantifiers, and how to use them.  What I really liked from this is that after every example, I asked to different students some sentences, and they were doing it in an excellent way. I could see that my explanations about this were good enough, and I did not need to go back and explain again.

When I finished explaining this, I asked questions using “any”, and they were giving me examples. I did reach my objective in this class, and this is one of the other things that I really liked. I did my best, and I got what I expected.

What I really did not like is that when I was teaching the topic, I asked to one student to give me a sentence using certain quantifier, and this student did not know how to say “refrigerator”. So the student said the word in the way she could. She did not do it in the correct way.  So everybody started to laugh, and what I did is, to tell them that all of them were learning even me and get fun of their classmates’ mistakes is not a good action. I asked to respect their classmates’ participation, and pay attention to what others were saying.

In the feedback, the teacher just told me that I did not tell a definition of what a quantifier is. He suggested me that if I am going to teach a specific topic, I have to give a definition of it. So this was what really happened in this classroom, and let me tell you that it was one of my good experiences that I had had.