Special thanks to teacher Darlene Mata for sharing with us many things during this term. Also,  for helping us to become better Student Teachers. ❤❤❤ ⚡⭐

From: Erika, Vanessa, & Cristian. 

- November 24th, 2015th.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 * INTRODUCTION TO THIS E-FOLIO

* THE CHANGING WORLD OF ENGLISH

* LESSON PLAN AS A SUCESS TOOL FOR TEACHERS

*TRADITIONAL TEACHING AND 21ST CENTURY TEACHING

* THE YOUNG LEARNER

*LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING

* WHEN THINGS GO WRONG IN CLASS

* THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

* ASSESSMENT

INTRODUCTION TO THIS E-FOLIO

        We are 3 young adults in the process of becoming teachers. We are from The University of El Salvador, and we study "Licenciatura en Idioma Inglés Opción Enseñanza." Our names are Erika Argueta, Vanessa Martínez, and Cristian Castro. We believe that there is a lot of things we can share with kids thanks to everything we have  learned during this term at the University. One of the reasons we chose this name for our blog is that we consider ourselves TEACHERS, and this is our world. SO feel more than welcome in here.

This semester an Uni, we had the chance to go and heve our very first experience dealing with kids. We had no preparation before, and we did not know how to deal with kids under the age of 7.  It was a nervrocking experience but at the end IT WAS WOTH IT. ❤

THE CHANGING WORLD OF ENGLISH

HOW HAS ENGLISH CHANGED THROUGH THE DECADES? HOW WILL ENGLISH BE IN THE FUTURE? 

         Since the 1900’s English has experienced many changes. Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its users. This isn't a bad thing; if English hadn't changed since1950, we wouldn't have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV.

" As long as the needs of language users continue to change, so will the language. The change is so slow that from year to year we hardly notice it (except to grumble every so often about the 'poor English' being used by the younger generation!). But reading Shakespeare's writings from the sixteenth century can be difficult. If you go back a couple more centuries, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are very tough sledding, and if you went back another 500 years to try to read Beowulf, it would be like reading a different language.”----Linguistic Society of America

        Our prediction about English is that in the future it will become one of the languages that you MUST Speak, English is now a tool for communication and education, but it will become something that you won’t be able to avoid. Kids will be taught English since the moment they learn how to produce sounds in their firsts months alive. Teachers will be present in every aspect of the learning process, and kids will become the teachers so that they can teach younger generations how to produce this amazing language.

LESSON PLAN AS A SUCCESS TOOL FOR TEACHERS

HOW USEFUL IS LESSON PLAN FOR TEACHERS?

Having a lesson plan makes a teacher’s life easier. In a lesson plan a teacher can have all of his classes planned in order to know the topics that he will develop with his Ss. The use of a lesson plan makes everything more organized and easier to understand.

IS LESSON PLANNIN A NEED ONLY FOR NQT OF FOR TEACHERS WITH PLENTY OF EXPERIENCE AS WELL?

       Lesson planning is for both of them. New Qualified teachers can have better lesson plans than the others. The fact that this teacher is “NQT” doesn’t mean that he won’t have good material to give to his kids. Obviously, teachers with plenty of experiences know how to create better lesson plans. That can be made thanks to the experience they have had throughout the years they’ve been teaching.

WHAT WAS YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE WITH LESSON PLANNING? 

       Our experience with lesson planning was not what we expected. It was ahrd for the 3 of us to create a lesson plan that we would ACTUALLY USE TO TEACH CHILDREN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE! It was hard at first, but then we got used to it. And from the first time we created our own lesson plan. we felt like actual teachers.

TRADITIONAL TEACHING AND 21ST CENTURY TEACHING

TRADITIONAL TEACHING

21ST CENTURY TEACHING

It is concerned with the teacher being the only one in charge of the learning environment/Process. The power and responsibility are held only by the teacher and they play the role of instructor and decision maker –in regards of the curriculum content and specific outcomes. They tell students they have 'knowledge holes' that need to be filled with information.     “The traditional teacher views that it is the teacher that causes learning to occur.” (Novak, 1998)

In this aspect, students are able to ask questions to teachers without feeling worried about the teacher’s response.  This one is also an education that integrates all kind of Ss to participate in spite of the race, sex, or religion they belong to. There are also more opportunities for all of those kids with disabilities to integrate into this marvelous learning process.

TRAILS OF THE 21^ST CENTURY TEACHER --- TOP 10

1- Personalized Instructions & Learner-Centered Classroom

This kind of teacher gives personalized instructions to his Ss. He follows a lesson plan, but he also tries to give instructions that can be understandable by everyone. His classroom is also centered in the learners.  Because they are the basis of the educational process.

2- He sees his students as producers

Today's students have the latest and greatest tools for learning foreign languages, yet, the usage in many cases barely goes beyond communicating with family and friends via chat, text, or even phone calls. Even though students are now viewed as digital natives, many are far from producing any digital content. That is why this teacher thinks that his Ss are able to produce more things that thought.

3- He learns new technologies

In order to be able to offer students different choices, having one's own hands-on experience and expertise will be useful. Since technology keeps developing, learning a tool once and for all is not an option. He has to be capable of using different tools that can help him develop a better job during his classes.

4- Goes Global

Today tools make possible for teachers to learn about other countries and people. Of course, textbooks are still sufficient and used by many schools around the world. There is nothing like learning languages, cultures, and communication skills from talking to people from other parts of the world.

5. He is Smart and Uses Smart Phones

Once students are encouraged to view their devices as valuable tools that can help support knowledge (but not as distractions), they start using them as such. Different students have different needs when it comes to help with new vocabulary or questions; therefore, there is no need to waste time and explain something that perhaps only one or two students would understand.

6.  He uses Blogs

They have written the importance of student’s and teacher’s blogging. Using a blog can help students to understand more about a certain topic.

7. He goes Digital

Another important attribute this kind of teacher has is that he goes paperless. Organizing teaching resources and activities on one's own website and integrating technology bring students learning experience to a different level. Also, sharing links and offering digital discussions as opposed to a constant paper flow allows students to access and share class resources in a more organized fashion.

8- Collaborative

Technology allows collaboration between teachers & students. Creating digital resources, presentations, and projects together with other educators and students will make classroom activities resemble the real world.

9- He uses Twitter Chat/ Facebook Chat

Participating in Twitter chat/Facebook chat is the cheapest and most efficient way to be organized, to share research and ideas, and to stay current with issues and updates in the field. A teacher can grow professionally and expand our knowledge as there is a great conversation happening every day.

10- Project-Based Learning

As today's students have an access to authentic resources on the web, experts anywhere in the world, and peers learning the same subject somewhere else, teaching with textbooks is very "20th-century.” Today's students should develop their own driving questions, conduct their research, contact experts, and create final projects to share all using devices already in their hands.

NEST & no-NEST

A NEST has some facilities when it comes to developing a class. The fact that is a Native English Speaker helps to understand easily the kids he works with. But a no-NEST sometimes has several problems thanks to the gap between him and his students. The language barrier seems to be big once they begin to develop the classes, but it disappears throughout the learning process.

THE YOUNG LEARNER

The kids we taught were the most amazing kids we had. Despite of their age, they are very smart and talented. In my case (Cristian speaks) the kids l taught English to didn’t know a lot of thigs, so that was a challenge for me. After some classes, l realized that kids were understanding most of the things l taught them and l felt good about myself.

My kids on the other hand (Erika speaks) were the most charming kids l have ever met! I had in charge 75 kids in total. (30 in K-5, 25 in K-6 and 20 in K-4) They were very hyperactive in every single class, but they also loved to participate in everything l used to do at the moment of teaching.

The kids used to react well to all of the activities we did with them. (Vanessa speaks) The chapters of the book “Teaching English to Young learners” gave us a lot of ideas to use in our classes, and what also helped us was the use of the different tools that were mentioned. In chapter 4, there were lots of ideas of tools we could use in order to teach English to Young kids. One of those tools was puppets; I remember Erika telling me she used them when teaching toys and colors. And l thought that there was no difference between the kids we had to teach and the ones mentioned in the book.

LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING

                                 LISTENING

"No child would spend a whole lesson listening to the teacher and understanding everything; It is obvious that LISTENING is the skill that kids acquire before reading." (Taken from Teaching English To Children)

In our practicum we were dealing with this skill more often that the other skills we’ll talk about later on.

Our groups of kids were from 4 to 6 years old, and that is why most of them can’t read or write. One of the biggest challenges we had was the distractions from the outside of the classroom (The noise from other kids and from the streets.) It was difficult for us to talk in way kids could listen because they hardly ever pay attention to what the teacher says.

Activities developed related to Listening

-        *Simon Says

-        *Follow me ( The train of Numbers)

-        *Sing along

-        *Listen and color    

                 ORAL WORK

“Speaking is perhaps the most demanding

 skill for the teacher to teach.”

"Sometimes, when dealing with this skill, we don’t know what kids want to say. Especially when you want your Ss to think about English as something that’s more than a “Mean of communication.

“The ideas that were shown in the “Teaching English To children” book helped us to know more about dealing with kids. It was better for me because l taught an introductory course to English. It gave me some ideas to approach children and teach them with a better method.” --- Cristian Castro

“Some of the challenges l had while teaching kids and using this skill were that most of the children wanted to say a lot of things, but they had no idea how to say them in English; they would try to change some words from Spanish by adding “ation” to the end of it. That’s definitely one of the challenges l had during this time.” --- Vanessa Martínez  

“I did almost all of the activities presented in the book (Using a mascot, puppets, silhouettes, etc. and it helped me to motivate kids to produce the language easily. I would say the name of the animal or the object l was holding in my hands, and they’d tell me the name the way they heard it. I didn’t want to change the activities because they already had stablished the lesson plan for the subject.” – Erika Argueta

                  WRITING

Because our kids were not that able to write big amouts of sentences, we didn't want to include any kind of activity that invilved this skill. Erika's kids from K-6 were the only ones who knew how to write some words; that's why she did some activities with them in which they had to write a lot. This one was by far the hardest part of all we dealed with.

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG IN CLASS

When things go wrong in the classroom (According To Vanessa's  Teaching Practicum)

1. There was an internal disturbance in the classroom 

One day, I was teaching colors. I was trying to explain one of the activities that I had prepared one day before the class, when  a child told me, “teacher, Johanna hit me’’. I did not know how to react to that because I had never passed through something like that before. I order to solve that problem, I called Johanna , and I asked her why she hit the child?. Johanna told me that the other child, Eliseo, hit her first so that she hit him too. I told her, “You cannot solve a problem in that way”. Finally, she understood and promised me that she would never do that again. 

2. The class went out of control 

         That day, I was teaching numbers when something happened. The children started to speak out loud, to run through the classroom, and to do what they wanted to. At first, I was thinking that they will pay attention some minutes after, but they did not pay attention at all. I tried to speak louder, to shut them up, but that did not work.  Their teacher came in to the classroom and tried to control them, but she herself could not so that I help her sitting down the children. At the end the teacher and I talked with them about their misbehavior. I asked them if they taught  they did something wrong , and they answered.  The teacher and I told them what the way we wanted them to behave was. 

3.An activity didn’t work 

          When I was teaching the numbers, I tried to make the children play ‘Sharps are coming, but in a simple way for them to understand easily. I explained every single step in Spanish. When we were about to start, the children started to push each other and to run through the hall since we were not able to play inside the classroom. Because I realized that they didn’t understand the game, I decided to change it so I invented one that I don’t even remember which was it about , but it worked. 

         I didn’t applied the tips presented in chapter 8 because in the time those problems happened , I had not read that part of the book, but I truly believe that most of the tips that the books teaches can be apply in almost every classroom. Of course, If I had read that, for me it would have been easier to deal with misbehavior.

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Erika's Oppinion

1. There was an internal disturbance

        One thing I noticed was that kids were constantly distracted by the other classrooms. It happened most of the time with K-4 because the K-5 kids were always talking, leaving the classroom, and running away from the teacher. This actually happened the first week l went to the kindergarten. lateer on, kids were no longer distracted by anything.

2- An Activity took too long

        During my second week of teaching, l had prepared some activities about animals for the kids to work on them. I had prepared the papers with the drawings l was supossed to give them; once l began developing my class, I realized l had not enough pages for the kids!! l asked the teacher that was in charge for permission to go out and fotocopy the pages, but she came out with an amazing ldea - to cut the pages in half and give them to the kids like that- Hard to believe, but it worked! Too bad the activity, which was supossed to last 10 minutes, lasted almost 30.

3- You had extra time

       Every week, after finishing classes with K-5 (at about 9.30am) l would sit down and prepare the material l'd use with K-6. That extra time was a helper because l really needed to organize my thoughts, ideas, and pages for the other classes.

4- An Activity was too difficult

For my K-4 Ss there was an activity that they couldn´t develop the way they were supossed to. l had given them some pipecleaners to create different shapes.(A square, circle, triangle, and a diamond) I didn't  know how to tell the kids the way they were supossed to do the shapes l had prepared for them. Anyway, they only did the easiest shapes during the time l had to develop such task.

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

                          What are the tools of the trade?

      The tools of the trade are useful materials you can use in your classes. Since the physical world is the main means of sending messages to young children, here we have some important tools we used in our teaching practices.

According to our experience, we are classifying the tools in two categories: USEFUL AND USELESS

USEFUL	USELESS
- PUPETS - PAPER DOLLS - PICTURE CARDS - CARD GAMES - BUILDING BLOCKS - TOYS - ENGLISH CORNER - BOOKS	- CARDBOARD GAMES - WORD SENTENCE CARDS - OVERHEAD PROJECTOR - CASSETE RECORDERS - CLOCK - CALENDAR - WORD DISPLAY - WORD CARD DISPLAY

     

We classified those tools as useful because of the age the kids we taught was. By being 4, 5, and 6 years old, they need to acquire the language through playing and having fun with different things.

And we consider that the “useless” are not age appropriate for the kids because most of them can barely read words but not sentences.

SELF ASSESSMENT

"I think that this course and the activities we did throughout the semester were a great adventure that will help me learn new skills for teaching English to children. It is crazy just to think I was teaching children because I had never done that, but I decided to take this experience as a challenge. I never imagined myself teaching children. Before I started to teach them, I was very nervous. I didn’t know how to deal with children; the only thing that I knew about teaching children is that treating them is not as easy as it seems because they are very restless, distracted, active, and sometimes hyperactive; to be honest I was scared. Now, I can say that in this course I learned more about solving problems in the process of teaching English to children.

Returning to what I think about this course; I’ve never expected to love this because actually I really love it. We know that seeing the little girls and little boys smiling is something beautiful, and that’s why I will try to do my best in every class I will develop in the future.

One of the problems I had when I was teaching happened when I was teaching colors. I have prepared the class; I have already done the lesson plan, but I had never expected that I was going to have trouble that day. I had prepared a game for practicing colors and I tried to explain to my students the easiest way for playing the game but they could not carry out the activity. After that I felt so bad because I did not have a “plan b”, so I could not solve the problem easily. I had to deal with three problems: first, an activity that was too difficult for my kids nevertheless, second, an activity that did not work and third, I had extra time because the game was the wrap up activity. I had to Improvise and I gave to everyone a page in order to they drew something."  -- CRISTIAN CASTRO

"Since the moment we started this curse, l felt the luckiest girl on earth. Ever since l first began taking this bubject, l wanted to go and teach young learners. l have had some experience with my little sister Alisson because l have taught her some vocabulary in English. This experience l had has helped me gain more confidence and feel comfortable with others. When l first went to the Kindergarten, l was nervous! It'd be my first experience teaching young kids. l was expecting the best out of the kids, but l was not sure lf l was going to make it through the day. After several weeks of learning how to be a teacher, l found out this is what l want to do with the rest of my life. 

Some recommendations I’d like to give you are:

- If you don't love English (especially teaching) make sure to choose the major you think will suit your necessities.

- If you have no patience with children, learn how to control yourself first in order to control other people." -- ERIKA ARGUETA

“ At the beginning of the course, I was a little bit scared about teaching English to young learners because I knew that I would have to cope with some problems, but when I realized that the teacher was going to explain all the things that we needed to know for teaching, I felt in calm. When I start the course I did not have big desires for teaching children, but that thought changed immediately after I taught my first class. Now I can say that I love children because they are so lovely and pure.  This semester, I have learned not only how to teach English to young learners but also how to solve problems in the classroom. The knowledge that I have got, will help to in all my life because they are like general knowledge for someone who want to become a teacher. I also think that I have not only grown as a student teacher but also as a human. Now I understand much better teacher who says that the world of teaching is not as easy as all the people think.  

My recommendations to better this course is reduce a little bit the theory because sometimes I personally felt like “there is a buncheof information”. I really like the way you teach most of the classes because you are not a traditional teacher and that make us as students be asking what is going to happen next and that is amazing.” – VANESSA MARTINEZ