Week 1. Observation. Part I

Well, this morning I eventually met group 1 of 4ESO or, in other words, my group. It is made up of 30 students, a lot of people I must say! At first glance, they seemed more attentive and focused than the other two groups of 4ESO. Well, I have to say that it was 8 a.m., so that was perfect as they were really calmed and surprisingly they were not spleepy! Besides, I had the feeling that they were a really nice group willing to work hard.

Today it was all about observation: "Observation for learning".

First of all Isabel, the teacher, introduced me to the students, and immediately she asked them if they remembered any expressions related to the topic they talked about the day before, which was "likes and dislikes". A lot of them participated and contributed by saying expressions like "I'm keen on.../I'm into.../I like.../I hate.../I'm crazy about" as well as "I enjoy doing...". I must say that there was a perfect interaction between Isabel and her pupils, you could easily see that she knew them very well. Once the students had all that in mind, she asked them to do an activity from the workbook about likes, dislkes and +ing forms, after giving them more examples of how to use them in sentences. She usually speaks English with the students, even though sometimes she switches into Spanish because some of the students don't understand all the points of the explanation she has just given.

Then, students corrected the activity by reading it loudly so that both the teacher and the other pupils could see if they were right or wrong. They did a really good job regarding both the grammar and the pronounciation.

Finally, Isabel asked them to work in pairs. They were given a picture from a magazine and their task was to talk about likes and dislikes using all the aforementioned expressions as well as -ing forms. As I wanted to observe and pay attention to all the groups, I tried to be with each group for a while and listen carefully to what they were saying and the expressions they were using. Sometimes I asked them questions about likes and dislikes so that they had the chance to interact with me. Besides, that was a really good way to get to know them better. They used really nice, worked and useful sentences. I think that Isabel did really well in doing the "speaking activity" in the last quarter of the hour, as the concentration of the students was starting to fall down after the grammar exercise.

I really enjoyed observing an English lesson, unfortunately I couldn't absorb all the information given both from the teacher and the students. Anyway, let's see what happens on Monday with the second observation lesson.