MY FIRST TEACHING PRACTICE

Here I am, doing my teaching practicum. Yesterday was the first time working with Intermediate I students; surprisingly, some of them were in the group I was before, so it made me feel very confident because I knew in advanced.
Everybody say that the first time you do something it is kind of hard, and it was not the exception; I faced some problems at the beginning, and the most remarkable was that I could not contact my tutor before the class; I tried to call her once and once again, but it was absolutely impossible. Because of that terrible situation, I was afraid doe to I did not know in which part of the lesson plan I had to begin. I talked to some of the students and they let me know what they were studying.

The first activity was very successful because I could reach the two objectives planned. Students were asked to stand up and make a circle; I brought to the class some pictures containing different images; every times that a student got the flash card, he/she had to say his/her name and a sentence related to the picture; in the first round students used the simple present, but in the second one they had to use the present progressive.

The activity helped me a lot because I could see the level of confidence students had and I could also know their names.

The rest of the class was all practice; the second activity was for students to establish the right order of a conversation; they were given the whole conversation cut into tears of paper. The activity was done in groups and I can say that it was successful, but not at all; I guess I made a mistake, the pieces of paper given to one of the groups were not complete; there was missing one line and it made the activity more difficult for them because the line was key in the whole conversation.

Something that I consider relevant is that in the group (the class) there are students with a very low level of English, and it makes the development of the class a little bit difficult because they hardly ever participate unless you push them. In addition to the idea presented before, the group is especial because there are students that begun the semester with another teacher, so they tend to make subgroups in the class; there are 3 students who always sit together, and the same happens with the others; in fact there are at list 4 different groups, so as a team conformed by our tutor and the other practitioner Eduardo, we are looking for strategies to be used in order to break those groups and make them work as a single team. As you can see we are dealing with a big challenge, so I would like you to give us pieces of advice; I know some of your ideas could be extremely useful for us.

These are the most relevant points about my first practice with intermediate English Students; next week I will let you know how my experience was in the second session.