II. CLASS MANAGEMENT AND ATMOSPHERE

• Provide a snapshot of your current teaching practice.

To teach young learners is an activity that I really enjoy. My students showed me a lot of good attitudes inside the classroom such as obedience, willingness, and enthusiasm, etc. The thing I like the most was my students showing me some lovely attitudes because it is a pure feeling. Despite they really enjoyed working in my activities, they now and then behave rather mischievous making the class a real challenge for me. Bonding with people is not a challenge for me, and I really get well with people especially little students that I had in the kindergarten.  I believe that a teacher must have a relationship not only teacher to student, but also a teacher can show empathy with his/her students’ problems. The teacher should put himself/herself on someone else’s shoes to solve classroom problems, and he/she needs to listen carefully to his/her students to inspire confidence. The teacher should create a good environment and use a variety of methodologies (TPR), (The Grammar-Translation Method), (CLL) in order to help the acquisition of knowledge and to enhance the students’ participation. The tutor must orientate the methodology based on the objectives that he/she wants to reach according to the students’ level. I myself as teacher must monitored my students to see in which way they learn better (pair-work, group-work, or public meeting).

By Andrea Arana

I was teaching children during two months in which I could teach five topics (the alphabet, greetings and leave-takings, colors, numbers and animals). I applied some techniques that I have learned from the teacher to whom I was observing; they were very useful. Also I took into account some details about the arrangement of desks and the use of colorful materials. In some classes I decided to sit the children on the floor for getting a major attention from them.

For teaching, I made the topics with letters of different colors. When I was teaching the colors I wrote my children’s names in sheets of paper of the same color, to children appreciate it better. Later I showed the children some illustrations and pictures in which they could watch the colors. I made some activities for children to apply what they have learned, and identified the colors by themselves.

For every class, I tried to use different techniques. I used colorful pictures and materials of different kinds. I drew things in color paper and I decorated them because I had noticed that children like colorful things. In the last class, I made a review about all the topics I taught for two months, to look how well children have learned.

In conclusion, there are many factors that help to the teaching-learning process in very young learners, but also it is necessary to improve some of them, for example to give the children the chance to know and familiarize better with this fascinating language, English.

However, this was a very interesting experience, and I could realize how difficult is to be a kindergarten teacher. They have a great responsibility, but also it is really pleasant.


 

By Jessica Rodríguez

When I started to teach in the school that I went since the first day I paid a lot of attention in every children in the classroom, in my case there were 16 students. Each of them were different in the way they speak, write, and so on. Every kid had different skills and my role as their teacher was to find out what their skills were. For example, some of them were very good at speaking, some other were better at writing or drawing etc. I used their abilities to improve their knowledge as much as I could and it worked it out a lot! At the beginning it was not that easy but with a lot of effort it succeeded.

Rapport was an important area in my teaching practicum because it helped me a lot at the moment of interacting with the kids because I was very careful with children. Remember that rapport is very important because it helps you to create a good bound between you and your students and I applied a lot of techniques that were very helpful to establish a good rapport in the classroom. Also, grouping was so helpful because it is a good tool to make your students work in little groups and together as a team they can give a lot of good results.

 

 

 

 

By Ernesto Azúcar