Lesson no. 2

Lesson no. 2
12 June 2009 / Friday
(15:10 – 17:25)

Intention:

(Also see the handouts at the end of the evaluation... I tried to make them as readable as possible in this blogpost...)

- Repetition of last lesson: this time I plan to make clear which questions should be asked in order to get the basic information about someone. Then I want the students to participate in a class dialogue and ask and answer each other’s questions. Since the introduction is a topic for everyone, I want the whole class to participate in it.

- The numbers 1 till 30 (also for the clock). (use handout from last time with the spelling of the numbers)

BREAK

- Days of the week (working days and weekends) --> What do you do on ___ ?

- Months of the year (Birthdays) & Seasons

BREAK

- Time (:00, :15, :30, :45)

Evaluation:

Part 1:
I started with the first part of the handout about the introduction. I briefly revised the few items we talked about last time with the help of the handout. I asked the first student the first question on the list ‘what is your name’ and he gave me an answer and then he/she asked the person sitting next to him/her the next question on the list (in this case ‘How old are you?’). Like this everyone got a chance to answer and ask a question.

Part 2:
The days of the week were mentioned and divided in the categories of working days and weekend.
Then I asked the first person in the row ‘What do you do on Monday?’. After giving an answer he/she asked the person sitting next to him/her what he/she did on Tuesday, etc.
The main question was written on the board before starting this class activity. Each answer given by the students was written on the board. This was a good activity mainly for both speaking and vocabulary building.
The following answers were mentioned by the students (I am writing the ones that I still remember… I neither got the time or the chance to write them down on a paper). I tried to pay some attention on sentence structure and the use of prepositions.
(note: The use of ‘X’ in the following sentences represents the name of a day of the week)
I watch tv on X.
I go to watch football on X.
I wash my clothes on X.
I like to sleep on X.
I go to the mosque on X.
I go to the football field on X.
I do shopping on X.
I go to the lesson on X.
I go to the church on X.
I go to school on X.

Part 3:
Months of the year: The names of the 12 months were written on the board. Then the main question: ‘When were you born?’, was asked. Each student was invited to come on the board and write their date of birth e.g. ‘I was born on 27 December 1986’. This was a good spelling exercise, because I think one learns best by writing a word. Another alternative to answer the main question was introduced by one of the students, namely ‘I was born on the 27th of December’

Part 4:
The students who began with part 3 were done quite early, and therefore I distributed the handouts about telling the time. These students began with these handouts, and since the rest of the group was still busy writing their date of birth on the board, I had enough time to look at the and also to explain the time to small groups of students. Sometimes it is better to explain difficult topics in small groups, and it helped to quite an extend. The exercises were a great practice. Once everyone was busy or done with the second handout I gave a general class about telling the time. I drew a clock on the board. I used a pink chalk to draw the hour hand (and made it significantly shorter than the long minute hand) and I used green color to make the minute hand. On the right side of the clock I also gave a key as to what color represented minutes and which one represented hours. I also made a big square bracket with one color on the right half of the clock, calling it the ‘past’ half and one on the other half and calling it the ‘to’ half.
‘Minute past/to hour’ was written on the board and I also told them ‘Minute always comes first’. This was a mnemonic to remember that the minute comes first when telling the time, and the hour next. The drawing of the clock with the explanation was very helpful. I explained the clock by drawing the hands of the clock at different times, and asked the students to try to give it a try to guess what time it was. This was an important and difficult topic, therefore I thought to call people to the board to write the time which referred to the drawing on the board. After a student was done, I changed the hands of the clocks for the next student. This was a good practice for writing numbers, because e.g. I asked the students to write ‘twenty past one’ instead of ‘20 past 1’.

Today’s lesson was approximately 2 hours long. That is quite long. There were breaks in between, but I never really said that we were taking a break. Next time I will try my best to keep some breaks in between :$

I really liked today’s lesson. Many people showed up and it was a lot of fun :)

I also mentioned the change in the timings of the Friday lesson and I’ll keep in mind to remind the students of the change during the next lesson too.

P.S:
There were a few things from the first lesson that I wanted to make clear e.g. the use of singular and plural form, and I actually forgot to do that. So that should be done on Wednesday.

Handouts:

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