esl ::: emily's so luscious

Practicum, Day Sixteen

Since I had to go to Asheville Monday night, Malinda filled in for me. She'll be doing the same next week, too, as I will be single-mindedly focused on comps. Since I'll be out so much, last week I told her she could start a unit of her own, and showed her the rough draft of my syllabus. We've finished up on the grocery-shopping for now, and I'm ready to move on to ingredient lists, recipes, and household cleaners ... since that's how I designed the syllabus ... but the unit she's working up is to do with employment. It's dead useful, so I'm not going to stop it, but it did cause a bit of disjointedness tonight. We split the class time, an hour of computer-work (only two students showed up for this) then an hour each for lesson. Continuing with the employment unit, Malinda led them through the job ads in the local freebie paper, and they talked about different jobs in the picture dictionary. My lesson, in contrast, seemed totally frivolous. I took a small story from one of the rejected side-by-side books, split up the sentences into single lines, added a few questions, and cut them into strips. I wrapped each strip around a piece of candy and put it in a plastic Easter egg (I put all my eggs in one basket, btw). Each student took two eggs, and read their line out loud. We put aside the questions for later. Then they worked together to put the story back together in the correct order. Then we read the story out loud, and answered the questions. The story was about the cultural significance behind meanings and traditions to do with colors, and the questions were more personal, like what is your favorite color, etc. I combined all the levels for the activity, b/c we had a brand-new novice tonight, who would not read out loud, and Yolande, who was able to help put the sentences together quickly. I asked her and Luis and Carmen to explain why they thought a sentence might go where it should, to get them to think about discourse markers. It was a fun activity, and they enjoyed talking about color-meanings in Mexico. They didn't seem to mind that tonight's class was disjointed, but I'd like to see a more cohesive three hours, rather than three separate chunks.

I felt I was taking a risk with the activity - it's a bit more challenging than what we've been doing lately, and less function-oriented. I've noticed they have trouble with function words when speaking, and so far all my lessons have revolved around content words. I needed a fun way to push their limits, without damaging their confidence. The risk paid off, I think. Mainly b/c by pushing those limits, I could tell a little bit about where they are, and where I need to go next. A little reading practice tonight, and when I get back from my week off, we can go on to cooking instructions. That's where the recipe lesson would fit, but this time we'll do a variation on that, and bake some something from a mix.

posted by E.M @ 11:50 PM