Today, 14^th February, 2017 I had my third teaching practicum. Students started Unit 2 about locations and music tastes. I started the class with the most popular warm up activity “the broken telephone” as I could see students were engaged in the activity, and they really liked it.

My first activity consisted of students asking their classmates “What is your favorite kind of music?”, so they had to walk around the classroom and  according to their classmates’ responses they needed to fill a bar graph marking an x in the box that corresponded to the genre.

Then, I asked them which genre do their classmates like the most and the least? and some students answered that rock and pop were the genres that their classmates like the most, and that Jazz was the genre that they dislike. 

After this activity, I gave each student a sheet of paper about an email of a person who was inviting a friend to see a movie. So, students had to fill in the blacks using prepositions because the email had to be focus on that. After that, I asked for a volunteer who read the email to the whole the class so that everybody could check the answers. As a following activity, I had students responding the email. 

In my last activity, I pasted a poster about an email in which I was inviting students to attend to a pop concert, so I asked for a volunteer who read the email to the whole class. Then, I asked students to tell me the prepositions that they could identify, and as a post activity, I had students writing a response for my email, so during that time I was monitoring students, and giving them examples of how they could answer the email. Finally, I asked two students to read the response for my email.

In this third practicum my mentor told me that I have improved many aspects about teaching. I had students more engaged in the activities, and the visual aids that I used were good.

On Thursday 9th, 2017 I did my second teaching practicum. I was in charge of teaching prepositions of time and place. I stated the class with a warm-up activity called “roll the dice” and for that I had students standing up making a circle. In this game, students had to pass the dice around the circle while I played some music, and when the music stops, the students who was holding the dice had to throw it and according to the number that the student had, she/he had to pick a piece of paper with that number from the board, read a question and answer it. I think that this activity was good to have students speaking English while they enjoyed playing it. 

After that, I developed a listening activity, but before playing the audio, I asked students the following questions: when you travel to a new place, What things would you like to see? What things would you like to do? What things would you like to buy? I had students writing a short list about those things, then I asked some students to share the list with the whole. During the listening, I gave students a sheet with a multiple choice exercise, and they had to listen and choose the correct answer. I played the audio three times because students didn’t understand it. However, they looked lost when I asked them to share their results, and I considered to play the audio again but time was flying and I needed to move on to another activity about vocabulary matching. In this activity, I gave students a sheet in which there were some vocabulary related to the listening, and students needed to fill the blanks with it. 

In my last activity, I used again the dice, but instead of numbers the dice had prepositions. So, I had students making a circle and passing the dice, and as the warm up activity the student who had the dice at the moment music stops, she/he had to throw the dice and create a sentence using the preposition that she/he got. 

As a conclusion, I can say I need to improve when giving directions because they are basic students, so I need to keep the directions simple and understandable.

      On February 3rd, 2017, I started my first teaching practicum and my first experience as a teacher at the university. I am teaching to Basic English students and that day I taught them about the verb to be, countries and nationalities, and famous people.

      I was afraid, anxious, and nervous because since the preparation of the materials to use in the class, I had some problems with the computer so that my anxiety increased. However, I had to start my class, so I tried to forget about that problem for a moment and develop the class as good as possible. 

         I started my class with a warm up activity in which Ss had to introduce themselves. The activity was good as Ss were engaged in it. Then, I developed an activity in which Ss had to see a video about the verb to be and sing the song. In the pre-activity Ss just listened, in the during-activity they sang the song, and in the post-activity, I pasted some sentences about the verb to be and students changed them into negative and interrogative form. During the development of these activities, I could notice the same students were participating and the others were quiet, and I think it is because they are afraid of speaking and make mistakes. I also developed an activity in which I presented Ss a PowerPoint presentation with the flags of some countries and they had to tell me the country and the nationality.

      Moreover, it was supposed that I had to develop a listening activity, but as I said previously, I had problems with the computer, so I could not do that activity. At this moment, I felt bad because I knew that I had to be prepared with a back-up plan, but I did not have it so that I had to move to the last activity that was a wrap up in which Ss had to write about a famous person. However, the problem with the computer affected my score.

      To sum up, I can tell you that I have to improve many aspects when teaching as my mentor told me. I will learn from the bad experiences that I had in my first class, and I hope that I can improve those aspects to become a better teacher and do my best in the other classes.