Group 3 proved themselves why they are referred to as an endless spring of ideas. I doubt if there is a limit to their imagination. Their activities were enjoyable, interesting, and creative. Transition from one activity to another was fairly smooth, and their activities-handling was quite skillful. Students seemed to enjoy every activity, and produced a lot of output in a spoken form.
The first activity, Go Fish’ was designed to encourage students to make a sentence using a verb and linking words. Students were asked to link each sentence to another so that a story could be made up. Students, at first, seemed to mainly focus on making sense of their sentences, but as time went by, they started to rest on their imagination, and a story got funnier and more interesting. The point of this activity was to make a creative story using verbs and linking words, but my students were more focused on winning the game. That makes me realize the importance of a role a big sibling needs to play. I initiated the first sentence, and I just blurted out one dull, run-of-the-mill sentence, and, in my opinion, that activity would’ve been even more interesting if the very first sentence had been a bit more exciting.
The second activity, ‘Anagraphic’ was somewhat similar to the first one in terms of creating a story, but this time students were given pictures to be arranged in order. Those eight pictures bore some ambiguity, and that led to variation and even diversity in story-making from group to group, which was great. Even though students had different opinions, I saw them manage such differences smoothly, which indicated some improvement in their conflict management.
The third and last activities, planning out a movie plot and filming it in person, were the climax of Group 3’s creativity. I was just amazed at their novelty. The idea was great, and students enjoyed the whole process. They also produced a lot of spoken output while engaging in those activities. The award for the winner group was another creative fun-factor.
It was a pity that group 3 had to skip one activity due to a time shortage. It was obvious how much effort and time group3 must have put into each activity, especially ‘Go Fish’ by just looking at the sheer number of cards they prepared. It was such a shame that most of the cards weren’t even turned over since students didn’t feel comfortable about getting a new card.
Since the midterm week is just around the corner, many students have been busy with lots of things to do, and I found some students didn’t even bother to take a look at the reading assignment because they thought it was too much. Even though they are responsible for doing all the homework on a weekly basis, when exam weeks are coming around, in my suggestion, we, big siblings, should adjust the amount of assignments to their needs once in a while.
Overall, the lesson was good enough to verify why Jeong-eun and Joo-yeon are professionals
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Haewon
4/15/2011 07:43:04 pm
The first group was well prepared as always. Their materials used in class were very creative and age & level appropriate.
First, their activity was go fish. It was a card-game-like activity where students were given 6 cards (3 linking words and 3 verb cards) each and they were to make a coherent story with their group members. I started the game by using two cards and encouraged my little sisters to use more than 1 card (1 verb, 1 linking word card) to make a sentence. They at first hesitated, but then they really enjoyed making their own creative story later on. This activity forced my students to use linking words and tested their skills to changing present verbs to past tense verbs. Their second activity was making a story based on the picture cards given to each group. When ordering the picture cards, students did not really use vocabulary words given in the reading homework, but later when they actually started making the story, students were eager to use more linking words to make the story better. They seem to enjoy the activity where they can freely express their opinions than the ones that are more controlled (at least for my little sisters). After the break was two linked activities where students needed to plot the story and later on they had to make a movie out of the story that they created. This was very fun and students enjoyed a lot. One setback of the activity was that although it took enough class time, students demanded more in order to practice verbally. They spent too much time taking the picture than practicing their verbal language. However students loved to see their pictures on the overhead presentation while they were presenting the story. Even though students were provided with a lot of linking vocabulary words in their reading homework, only few easy ones were used. Maybe because they needed to study for their midterms and that they did not have time to thoroughly read their homework. Overall, I and my little sisters enjoyed all the activities! =)Hope Jungeun gets better soon.
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Jeongeun
4/16/2011 04:08:56 pm
Week 7: April 14, Narration
Usually, after an open class, I felt even more depressed than happy because some mistakes I did keep bothering me. This lesson was no exception. After this difficult experience, I collect myself to find what I should learn from this lesson.
First, I thought about the value of reading homework. After the previous teaching group’s lesson, I thought that reading homework might be a key to students’ better learning. Thus, I put my effort on making reading assignment. However, I found that the majority of students had not read thoroughly. Therefore, I realized that 10 pages of reading homework are too much for them. I think that the amount of reading homework needs to be reduced. In my opinion, when designing the lesson plan, we need to consider the worst situation that students don’t read it. In other words, our lesson plan had better start on this worst case.
Next, this lesson made me think about the level and type of the first activity. In my belief, the first activity should be easy one to be able to activate students’ English mode. I also thought that checking reading homework could be a good first activity. However, if students only glance over the reading homework, the activity based on reading homework would be very demanding for students because they are not familiar with the reading assignment. Therefore, knowing students’ starting point is essential for successful teaching. However, we meet GEP students once a week, thus it’s very hard to appraise. Therefore, because I applied this idea to our lesson, the first activity was challenging to some lower level students. Personally I thought this game useful and effective when I tested it with a native speaker before applying it to the lesson plan because I should think conjunction linking to the previous story and listen carefully what the native speaker said. However, in reality, I observed this negative effect on lower level students during the lesson as colleagues pointed out when we played this game last Monday. I sensed slightly that if students couldn’t make a proper sentence, they might feel more frustrated than interested.
I also had a chance to consider the conjunctions used in spoken language. After the lesson, I asked my school’s native speaker to story tell, “The Paper Bag Princess” to compare my storytelling and my school’s native speaker’s narration. I found that she used only a few conjunctions in her story telling such as so, then, and, but, before, finally and so forth. Then, I was storytelling the same story to her. She indicated that some conjunctions are more often used in written language than in spoken language. I didn’t notice which ones are used for spoken or written language when I prepared the reading assignment. If I focus on the spoken language conjunctions used, the task could be less demanding.
Another thing that I learned was to make wise interactive decisions by checking and adjusting time and the student’s working. During this lesson, Jooyeon and I should often make interactive decisions. For example, when the first activity was almost finished, Jooyeon asked me whether students presented their story or not. At that time, students finished their activity about 10 minutes before the planned time. Even though our basic principle was that students didn’t present their story at the first period, I thought 10 minutes would be enough for students’ presentation, so we decided to do presentation. Personally, it was very pleasurable to listen to weird and funny stories, but there was a problem that the first activity pushed students to produce something and it took longer time than I expected. As a consequence, we made the second activity longer and cancelled the third activity. I think that it was wise decision to skip the third activity. I learned that interactive decision should be made in a very short time, so it was very hard to choose the right and wise decision.
Relating to time management, planned activities took longer time than I expected. First, I was sorry not to make it on time. Second, I felt sorry to students because I keep pushing the students to finish on time. I didn’t want to make them hurry, but time was ticking and the activity was not finished. It was stressful not only for me but also for students. Next time, I’d like to assign more time to a productive activity.
I also reflected on my weakness in the view of teacher’s role. It couldn’t be better that teachers are able to be good language models for students. This role is really demanding to me. In activity 2, I told the original story, but it would be nicer to use Robert Munch’ exciting and funny storytelling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIPrb-sA6Uo) instead of my poor storytelling. I’d like incorporate native-language resources into my lesson plans next time when I’m not f
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Jeongeun
4/16/2011 04:24:57 pm
I’d like incorporate native-language resources into my lesson plans next time when I’m not fully confident.
Lastly, I appreciate all the colleagues to lead student to be able to complete our lesson plan. Especially, I’d like to mention that Jooyeon is the creative genius behind all the inspiring ideas in our lesson plans such as the card game, masks and Ferreoscar award.
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Jeongeun
4/16/2011 05:33:30 pm
^^ I'm getting better. Thanks, Haewon.
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Soohyun
4/16/2011 08:49:27 pm
The group1’s lesson contained activities where students actually could make good use of things from reading assignment if they studied them before. This week, as other colleagues mentioned, many students seemed not to study thoroughly since it was a mid-term period.
The first activity ‘Go Fish’ was a lot of fun. But the problem was that I was the almost only one who truly enjoyed in my group since most of my little siblings appeared to struggle with it. Thanks to guest student, Soohyun,Choi, it could a little bit lightened up but most of the time my two little siblings ended up thinking and stammering to be creative both in ideas and language. I tried to give a model to use both cards for verbs and linking words but each person took too much time and I had to ask them to get a new card. Thus, shamefully it ended up with my winning the game… Like Jeongeun mentioned, it looked quiet challenging to those who were not yet capable of freely controlling and expressing their own ideas.
In the second activity ‘Anagraphic’, my little siblings and I spent too much time to arrange the order of the pictures. Not likely Haewon’s little siblings, mines had a hard time to produce what they had to say in a complete sentence for each picture. They kept asking me how to elaborate and started to memorize them for a presentation. It made them not to be attentive to what other groups were presenting. Before the class began, I expected that a lot of creativities involve in the activities but I realized that I should give up such expectation from lower level learners. Therefore, in storyboard making and filming sessions, I stopped pushing them to be creative and let them decide whatever they felt easy to do with. Even though they came up with rich girl and a poor man type of boring plot, they seemed to be more comfortable to get engaged in language production process. Here I learned cognitively challenging tasks can be more appropriate for higher level students. Also students definitely enjoyed the filming part. It was just astonishing to see teaching group’s boldness, not to be afraid of taking a risk to try out activities that can be challenging for the teachers to manage. I especially liked the idea of using a rubric for the students to evaluate organization and elements of story.
By the end of the lesson, I came to doubt if my little sibling were rudimentary but I categorized them as moderate low in the first interview. I think I should pay careful attention on their language from next class.
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Jooyeon
4/16/2011 11:51:45 pm
The target task of lesson 7 was to tell a story looking at a series of pictures. When I took the MATE workshop, I found out that many students did better job in task5 than in task3 or 4, which indicates that many students are more familiar with telling a story rather than describing. So I expected the students to do a good job
The topic of the lesson was to make a movie based on the storyboard. The topic itself was well-suited to the task. Students seem to enjoy themselves while creating a story and taking pictures. It was fun to watch the “films” of each group. That’s why I personally liked the second half of the class. As for the first half, I kind of felt we gave too much burden on the students from the beginning, and observed several students looking bored. Also, we failed in time management.
The first activity was to go over the conjunctions and past tense forms of verbs using a card game. I had speculated that the students would have fun a lot, but I observed several students were struggling to make a creative story and a grammatical sentence at the same time. It was different from group to group. Some groups finished the game too quickly even before the designated time limit whereas the students in other groups were gathering cards rather than throwing them. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t easily decide whether to continue with second round or to finish the game. I abruptly decided to share the stories the groups came up with, which was not in the scenario, and I’m still not sure if it was a good decision. Also, I just let the winner students tell the story but the students didn’t know how to summarize the long story to short and the rest of the student had to just listen for a quite long time. Soo hyun did a good job to give each group members chances to talk. The second activity was to reorder jumbled pictures and create a story. Students did a good job to create a story and present them. But again, there were students who didn’t pay attention to the presenting group. We thought of an idea of having the students tap on the desk when they heard conjunctions to make the students more aware of the conjunctions as well as to pay more attention, but it didn’t go that well as we thought. The biggest problem was time management. We didn’t expect that the students needed so much time to create a story making sense of the pictures. So we resulted in skipping the third activity.
The fourth and fifth activities were fine, and went well as we expected. But I thought we had to explain what a storyboard is about in a simpler language, and what they had to do with the blanks. This time, Jeongeun just let the students sit at their table so that they could present in a more comfortable condition. The students’ pictures were so funny that everybody had a great fun. Big sibling again did a good job in helping them use past tense verbs and conjunctions. The jedge’s criteria were designed not to grade them but to make them more aware of the organization, past tense verbs and conjunctions, which served our purpose well.
Overall, time management and several clumsy instructions due to unexpected happenings were the biggest problem of our lesson. Also, I realized that not all the activities should have creative and fun factors. Our activities all forced the students to use their creativity and unlimited use of the previously given input so the students had lesser space for the working memory handling so many things at the same time. The earlier stage of the lesson should include more simpler and repetitive type of activities.
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Soyun
4/17/2011 10:25:16 am
The theme for week 7 GEP class was about making movies and the objective was for the students to be able to narrate using past tense verbs and linking words. Group 1 was very creative in preparing the lesson. Their activities were lots of fun and encouraged students to produce language in an enjoyable atmosphere. All the activities were well-prepared and fun. I especially loved the idea of making the Ferreoscar award. It just showed how much effort they have put on preparing for the lesson.
The first activity, Go Fish, was a game in which students had to make a sentence using a verb and linking words. The trick here was to make the verb into a past tense and continue telling a story using linking words. I witnessed that some students were not familiar with using part tenses and did not know how to use some linking words such as “so… that…”
The second activity was to reorder jumbled pictures and create a story. Students had lots of fun creating their own stories based on how they ordered the pictures. I made them be creative and did not get too much involved in the part of creating the story. I just kept reminding them to use past tenses and include proper linking verbs. They did a very good job both in creating their story and presenting in class. When students were presenting, the teaching group made students tap on the desk when they heard conjunctions. I liked it better when it was done while Jeongeun was telling the story instead of when the students were giving presentation since it was a little disturbing in hearing what the students were telling.
The next two activities were interconnected. Students made a storyboard and filmed their stories based on that storyboard. One thing that could have been better was the part where the teaching group just made the students read the definition of a storyboard. The definition was not very easy to understand and a little further explanation might have been good for the students to understand what a storyboard is. The students decided on the setting, character, and plot by themselves and enjoyed taking pictures to make their own movie. I think it was really a good idea to make students take their own pictures. I could see how much fun they were having. This time, the teaching group let students make a presentation in their seats. One observation that I want to share is that when students are presenting in their seats, they tend to read out from what they have written down and also depend on their big siblings when producing language. I could witness many little siblings reading from their notes and looking at their big siblings too much for help when they were speaking out. And once again, the Ferreoscar award was really genius!!!
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