Activities in the classroom.

  😃Hello over there.😃

This has been a new week before vacations, and now we are here to learn about the activities we have in a classroom and all the points that it takes to deliver a very good class. We have group activities, measure time, check participation, and make sounds. There are other important details such as warm-up activities and how different they may be. 

In the warm-up activities, we have different approaches where we can vary that are lead-in, activation, icebreaker, or a community build activity.

Lead-in: Here you introduce a bit of what the topic of the day is and even if they do not know deeply about it so it will be normal to make mistakes since they know nothing about that.

Activation: This can be a review of the last topic and students are able to remember the information previously acquired.

Ice breaker: Fun activities that help students to get confidence and have some energy in the class and can also be a method for learning. Just make it fun with learning.

These need to be dynamic, short, and engaging.

By the way, this is a to-be-continued activity because we will have some insights next class. 😎

Now we have the types of activities we have in the classroom. On the first hand, when lesson planning it is very important that when starting the class the teacher is clear with the objectives of the class. This will help students to know what the class goals are. 

Group activities. It is essential that the teacher pays attention to know the group and how they behave thanks to the behaviorism method. There are always students that gather with the same group and they get into a comfort zone to study the idea is to get to know people and learn together and from them. We can be creative and make some activities to split those forever groups and still make them feel comfortable with the learning environment. As for some activities, you can make grupos by the color of their clothing, shoes, backpack, etc, and some other activities that you can come up with.

Measure time activities. Measuring time is unforgettable in good lesson planning since it is part of your class. We do not expect to have perfect timing or perfect class but to have a good class without taking that long and making it boring. Some activities can be displaying a timer on the screen or counting out loud so it helps to create an environment where the students feel pressure but they are learning and active.

Check on participation activity. It turns out to be significant that all students participate. We will have many students that are shy and will never participate by themselves so they need some motivation to do so. Added to the discussion topic, here we make sure that all students work equally in the classroom and part of the activities can be listing the students on the whiteboard, giving them a sort of reward for participation, and up to your creativity.

Activities to make sounds. Some days students will feel sluggish or bored, that is the moment when we can be creative and keep students focused on activities and they have that energy from you and create a great class environment. You can play some background music, counting out loud also counts, clapping, etc. 

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In addition, we are able to feel free of having different resources to use in class, it may be a teddy bear, a ball, a dice, etc. Objects are useful in a classroom so the class itself engages in the learning method.

The next participant could be you

To finish our class we sang the birthday song for Miriam whose birthday was this class day, and besides congratulating her we learn how important is to connect with the class and make it a community-building activity. 

It will do it for this entry. I will see you after this short vacation period. Hope you enjoy and rest enough because the best is on its way to start this semester. 👋👽

Lesson Planning

 👀This week has been a little bit different since we went one day to the university, so, all classes have been online. Throughout this week we are focusing on Lesson Planning and how important it is. 

To carry out lesson planning there is a variety of important points to consider such as the duration of the class, the activities that are effective for the lesson, the aids I am using, etc. 

Having all this into account we can avoid the class turning boring, students being distracted, not achieving the class objective, and so on 😴. All these can be omitted when we have a good lesson planned that also requires us to know what the students know and the knowledge they have about a topic before we start developing a class as if they knew.

We are able to make use of the teaching methods, which will help enormously for us to develop a class. I encourage them to use materials such as cards, pictures, or anything that helps all the students to learn. I know that we can get excellence in class by having good lesson planning. 🙀

CCQ and ICQ can help us to have better interactions with the class. Something we can do is not assume that they know everything. Meaning, we are taught that not everyone learns in the same way, there are people who will need other ways to do so. And by practicing ICQ or CCQ we can have a different approach to students, this is my opinion because it will mostly help to check what they are learning and to have a good pace in the class. 

CCQ stands for Concept Checking Questions. Here students are asked for giving a concept as such, it may be about the kind of food, animals, etc. It is to have longer answers to make sure they understood the topic. 

ICQ stands for Instruction Checking Questions. Students are asked specific questions such as What is the color of the bus? Did she go to school? or any questions that let you know they got the instructions and paying attention of course. 

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This should do it for this week. I hope you are learning with me about Lesson Planning and getting ready to deliver classes soon 😎

First Last Day.

hi there everyone! I hope you are doing terrific. So yes, this is the first day of our last semester at the University. We are all excited about what is coming next and this day was full of surprises too, I will tell you why...

In the class, the teacher Orlando had a surprise test from previous courses that he had even SEMESTERS ago! I honestly did not remember any of it but it was very refreshing after our break we could review each of the questions and we were able to discuss and so. I scored 4 out of 15 questions. I will not show you my test but I tell you that it was not applicable to the semester's grades, gladly. 

During the first period, we will have theory classes but in the last two, we are going to be teaching finally. It will be very exciting after a long time without teaching for me. We need to get at least twenty students for this class, meanwhile, it is time to plan our classes. 

Ready to teach and continue learning.

See you in the coming entries.