Happy Monday and welcome to December! This month is commonly known as the most precious month. This is the last month in which everyone has to be ready welcoming the new year with the new spirit. In this month also, we reflect all we have done in the eleven previous months, what the good and bad. Today, I would also like to reflect and turn back again about how the process of English learning in the previous week in my classroom.You know, teaching children of EFL is not always easy task. Moreover, if they are poor of English knowledge. This happens in my classroom. My classroom is about 11-12 children around 7 to 8 years old. They are children around my house in a suburban area where the family background is lack of English knowledge. So, the children get the lesson only at schools and courses. Fortunately, they still have a willingness to learn more about English. Few of them are fast learners and other are slow learners, Ups......I almost forget to tell you, this classroom is my own class at T-SbI; Okay...this is my classroom reflection!
Last week, I have already prepared a lesson plan to teach English for children at beginner level. The topic I chose was clothing based on the syllabus of their book at school. This was the second meeting at the same topic, so my lesson plan consisted of drilling activities about clothing vocabulary. It was simple lesson plan and focused on writing practices of the names of clothes.
First of all, I started the lesson by delivering them a greeting and then reviewed/recalled what we have learnt in the previous meeting. I showed them clothing flashcards and they repeated me as a model how to pronounce them. I also asked them to show me their own flashcards made in previous meeting and gave them appreciation.
My goal of this meeting was to review the topic of clothing, hopefully they would recognize more about the spellings and words. After opening activity, the children were given a worksheet of word search game about clothes. They did the task individually and you know, it was really noisy. They kept calling me many times asked me how they could do the task. I said to them to wait and stay calm. I helped them one by one and told them about the procedures slowly. Finally, it finished.
The children took the next worksheet of matching pictures and words. Here, they could do by themselves, but it was getting noisy again when they told me that each of them was the first and asked if they got a star sticker. I said that they could get it later. Next, the children got the third worksheet, it was missing letter. There were ten incomplete names of clothes writing and the children had to fill the missing letter. It was quite calm but not long after that one of my students sang a song, and you know it was "dangdut" traditional song that usually sung by older people/ singers on a 'dangdut' stage show. Of course, it was not in English lyrics but they seemed enjoying the song so much. I thought that in their everyday life, they used to listen to that song. Hmm...It was really surprising. Well, they could do the task well enough while singing.
The last activity was arranging scrambled letter to be the right spelling of clothes vocabularies. If they forget the names, I told them to look up again on the previous work sheet. I did not give them a timing set, because I was afraid of the slow learners ones. The class could not be set up in a competitive situation. My focus was in reviewing the vocabulary of clothes. At last, I checked their work and I gave them a score and smile emoticon on the worksheet. On these activities, they felt happy but I think they still need to learn more and more.
After the classroom, I think I should have some reflections about the children's activities in learning English. Here are my reflections about my classroom experience:
1. In the first activity, I do not tell the procedure dealing with the word search game. I think that they have already known well about this game, since it is popular game around. One more thing that I forget is their background knowledge. Each task given to the children, I should also prepare the procedures/instructions in the simplest way before they do the task.
2. Individual task is not always proper enough for certain task. I should try to make them work in pair or group work to make them easy to learn and share the knowledge of certain activity. Besides that, the noisy classroom can be managed little bit well. The children also can ask their partner how to do the task.
3. I should avoid the use of star sticker as the form of appreciation for this class. They keep claiming who the first one is and deserves the star and of course the classroom is getting noisy and chaos.
4. The third reflection is quite unique. Exactly, singing in the middle of learning is good. But, I don't think it is good enough if they sing a song that not suitable for their age, even it is not in English lyric. As you know, it is English classroom. I haven't got any ideas how to solve this problem or how to get them accustomed to English environment. I know very well that it is not as simply as imagine. We only have one meeting a week and 90 minutes for each meeting. It is almost impossible. But, I'm sure there will be a way. Sometimes, I also give them some nursery songs, but may be another local song is more interesting for the children in suburban area.
My conclusion is being a good English teacher we have to keep studying more and more! I will keep this in my mind.
