Sixth week of my school placement

This first week of the second term is very short, as it started on a Wednesday. I guess that is good for all of us, teachers, students and trainees, because it will give us the chance to enjoy a soft landing into the new year, as it were.

I was curious to see if the English teachers in my school intended to start with the regular contents straight away, or they planned to have a first transitional lesson. Both of them told me that they were going to continue with the usual lessons for several reasons: in pre-primary, children lack the communication skills required to talk in English about their holidays; in primary, they had plenty of days before Christmas when they did other activities and, besides, they already talk about Christmas in their regular classrooms, so the teacher sees no point in repeating the same conversations in the English lesson.

I also think that it is good to enter into full school-mode as soon as possible once the holidays are over. Maybe you can have a special warmer at the beginning, but other than that, going back to a known routine helps us all to focus.

This week we started with the new stories in LH1 and HH4. I loved the way the teacher performed the LH1 story with all students in a semicircle dramatizing it at the same time. They enjoyed it a lot, and the teacher did it very well, using gestures, intonation and speaking very clearly.

Having a chance to see how stories are first told has made me realise that it is hard for the teacher, who needs to memorise the exact words of a quite long narration. It is all right for a teacher who holds a permanent position, because it will be challenging on the first year, but if you are a teacher who just arrived on that day to school to take over a teacher who is on leave, it seems impossible to be able to follow the lesson as it has been designed. That is a great problem I see in this method, and there is no easy way around. I would like to build up on this topic next week, as I feel that it might have some negative side-effects for the teacher.