I will bring here just the first part; what I write every week, because I think it should be in my blog, like the diaries of my two previous in-school trainings.
Well, there are so many things that could be said, but I don’t want to make a never ending diary, so I will try to be selective.
First of all, I will start with my planning. So far, I will be attending lessons for one group in each of these levels: HH4, HH5, LH1, LH2 and LH4. The school has three groups per level, so I have decided to choose one in each level. There are three English teachers: my tutor, who works full time and holds a permanent position for three years now, and two other teachers who work part-time (one of them takes HH4 and HH5, while the other one teaches in LH5 and LH6). The one who teaches in HH is new and is taking over a teacher who is on maternity leave.
I will maintain this planning for a few weeks, to get an overall idea of how they work, and maybe later on I will concentrate on HH4, HH5, LH1 and LH2, taking part more actively in lessons with more than one group per level. That is the plan, but we will see how things develop in the forthcoming weeks.
My tutor takes the English classroom and has all her lessons there, while the other two teachers perform their lessons in the regular classroom of each group. Here are some pictures of the English classroom, which is spacious and full of light.
This is a general view of the classrooom
Another general view, with all the students’ coursebooks stored in the back
The blackboard, with the teacher´s desk on the left
Some useful sentences and structures on top of the board
Class lists on the bottom, to keep track of the helpers; and material for the daily routines
Hocus and Lotus poster for LH1 and some other material
Characters from the reading books for LH4
Storage space to keep the reading books for all grades, LH1 to LH4
Spelling reminders on the wall
Even though Astigarraga Herri Eskola is a state-funded school, it follows the methodology set up by the fee-paying ikastolak: Artigal in HH and Eleanitz in LH. I have been taking notes about all the activities that we do in each lesson, but writing them all would be too long. Instead, I will write the things that have struck me the most in these first days.
Both Artigal and the Eleanitz material for LH use stories to structure lessons. Each academic year comprises six stories/units, so each story takes roughly six weeks. Right now, all groups in HH and LH are in the second story.
In LH, the routines at the beginning of the lesson are the same for all levels, although they are performed in a slightly different way. There is a helper each day who takes care of the routines and of handing out the coursebooks that are kept in the classroom. First, the helper says “good morning, everybody”, and the rest answer “good morning, x”. Then, the helper chooses a classmate to pose the first question (classmates who want to ask raise their hands), which is always the same: “what day is it today?”. The helper looks up the name of the day of the week, the date on the calendar, and the name of the month and the year. Depending on the age, the helper will copy or write the whole date on the board, or just the name of the week and the month. Then, it is time for the second question: “what’s the weather like?”, and the helper chooses the icon and says rainy or partly cloudy, or whatever. The third question is “who is missing?”, and the fourth question is “how are you?” (four choices: happy, sad, angry or tired, and the older ones add why they are feeking that way using “because…”). After that, the teacher sometimes will ask other children how they are feeling and why, and they have to answer “because…”.
I find these routines quite repetitive, assuming they are kept the same all year and every year, to be honest. Besides, they don’t add much to the routines children do in their regular classroom in Basque. It would be nice to at least change the order of questions in the higher levels, to test if children really understand the questions, or they just guess by the order. Nevertheless, routines take little time.
I have noticed that in LH sometimes they do an activity in just one small group (a role play, or a game), but only 4-5 children out of 25 get that chance to perform it. The rest are expected to sit quietly and watch, which is a quite unrealistic expectation. I don’t see what the rest can learn out of it, and I think I would try to implement ways to have all children performing the activity, even if that means the teacher will not be able to monitor everyone all the time. I think that, overall, that would improve their chances of learning. Besides, the younger ones find it really hard to bear such a long time being inactive, and they inevitably start to misbehave (that happened this morning in the LH1 lesson, where we ended up with most children having done no other task but sing one short song in a 45 minute lesson).
In the HH lessons, I encountered a totally Audiolingual activity, performing a dialogue with finger puppets, where children repeated the parts of each character. They are very short dialogues, so children can maintain their attention with no trouble. Of course, handing out the envelopes which contain each children’s puppets, taking them out of the envelope and putting them on their fingers takes much longer than performing the play, but children are practising other skills meanwhile, so I think it is ok.
There was one shocking thing in the puppet stories, though: the two I have listened to so far end up with a choice that the main character has to take (put the biscuit in the mouth or in the box, eat the much hated fish or feed it to the cat), and depending of which choice each child does, the teacher will ask them to come forward and either say “good boy/girl” and give them a kiss, or say “naughty boy/girl” and spank them saying “smack, smack”. Now, this spanking I didn’t like at all, I must say. It is obviously a game, and children like it, but it isn’t consistent with the message that is given to children in HH about not hitting others. When I told the teacher about my doubts on it, she said that she found it awkward too, and that one child had spanked her while she was doing it in class, and she had to tell them that that wasn’t allowed (telling a 4-5-year-old in English that they shouldn’t do what they just watched the teacher doing…).
During the week, I have made a copy of the Artigal material (one CD and 3 DVDs), and I have been reading the explanation on the principles of this method and how the stories should be performed. After having read it, I see that what seemed an Audiolingual activity to me is quite something else, as children don’t just repeat everything they have heard. When the teachers performs the story, depending on the place where they stand they will be one character or another, so children understand the plot and repeat what each character says, but not what the teacher says when standing in a neutral position and acting as a narrator who gives the word to each character (e.g. “and then the little girl said…”).
Once I get a bit used to Artigal, I plan on starting to take over my teacher in small tasks, such as performing the finger puppet dialogue, or performing the storytelling, so I start practising a bit. Both my tutor and the HH English teacher are very nice. Particularly the HH teacher has encouraged me to start practising in class and has told me that I can start whenever I feel ready for it. So far, I have been sitting beside her (except if some children in the group need an adult by their side to focus attention, when I have been sitting by them), and doing everything she does. As children are usually the most open minded kind of humans you can find, they have accepted me fine.
Next week I will start analysing the LH material, which seems to consist on one activity book and one reading book per student in each grade, plus the teacher’s guide and CDs with the listening material.
English teachers need to have an awful lot of things in their mind: they have to learn a lot of names (there are 17 to 26 children in each group and three groups in each grade), they have to memorise the dialogues, songs and rhymes of the story they are working on with each grade, and they have to keep track of how far they have gone with each of the three groups in the grade. Compared to the regular tutor work I experienced in my previous two in-school trainings, it is much harder on that side, I have to say.
Well, I think this is enough for my first week. Next week I will write about the sort of tasks performed in LH mainly.
iruzkinik ez:
Argitaratu iruzkina