3rd Journal entry

September 8th

Rivera-Huila

Professional Development program

Colombus American School

This was the third session, the second face to face interaction, as usual, the setting was the Science lab. In our plan we have thought that the restaurant was a good place to develop the activity but due to institutional activities, it was not possible to do it in this place. To start with, we were very concerned about the amount of teachers presented on the class, there were only two participants, on time. The rest were having breakfast and doing thing from the school. We were very worried because it is not possible to have a class with only two participants. We decided to wait until 9:00 am. By that time we have four participants, and the teacher started the class.

He presented the topic and the objectives for the lesson. In this time the participants were participating more, it was an appealing topic for them. Teacher Sergio present a PPT presentation with the vocabulary about food and drinks. The participants were very concerned about the pronunciation of the words. Then after taking into account some suggestions that the same participants asked us after the first session, we decided to involve the teaches in the development of the class. First of all we have an activity with some flashcards in which they have to label the name of some food. It was interesting to see how the learning strategies of the participants increased from one class to another, some of them started associating pictures with words, others prefer the use of dictionaries, and also peer correction is one of the most used by them.

After reviewing the vocabulary with this activity, the second part of the activity was even more interesting. The instructor, had to cover the eyes of the participants with a piece of clothing. Then some food (realia) was in a desk, the participants had to touch and smell the food in order to guess the name of each object. The participants enjoyed the class, and it was easy for them to remember the name of most of the food. At the end of the class, the instructor present a video with a sample conversation for a restaurant situation. They took into account most of the expressions and they video tape their own videos to be uploaded to Edmodo.

From the participant’s perspectives, this was a remarkable experience because we head comments such as : “if my English teacher had used strategies like this I would had learned English easily”. Those words enrich our project and also motivate us to develop more interesting activities for them. For the next class it is necessary to bring more TPR activities in order to make them more active during the classes. In this opportunity teacher decided to organize the couples for the dialogue exercise in order to get familiar with the different voices of the classmates.