I thought leaving 20 minutes earlier this morning for class would give me a bit more time to prepare (after the copier fiasco on Tuesday). Turns out leaving 20 minutes earlier gets you there later than the first time. Harrisburg is not a calm place at 8 in the morning. Despite my almost accidental punctuality something amazing happened this morning as I was handing out newspapers and name tags to students.
They remembered my name!
It might sound a little nonsensical, but I got a serious kick out of everyone that greeted me personally this morning, and it put me in a terrific mood to teach class. I am determined now more than ever to learn everyone's name and address people individually, quite a task with different students passing through each day. Give me til the middle of next week.
While my orientation and first day of class was more observing and one on one tutoring than anything else, today I fully took the reigns on teaching. We began our lesson on reading comprehension by taking a closer look at a few articles from yesterday's newspaper. The first article, about a dog in Alaska that saves a family in a burning building, presented a more elementary reading level. So we alternated reading sections of the story while stopping to discuss when anyone had a question. I pointed out important vocabulary words they should know, especially homonyms, which are more common in English than any other language. Also, we discussed specific grammatical rules - such as plural possession - that were confusing.
I left to make copies of worksheets for the students as they read another article to themselves. This article, about China's new media broadcasts, was significantly more difficult to read than the first. I encouraged them to make notes specifically where they had trouble understanding, and to ask me any questions they might have. If and when a student needs assistance with individual work, I tutor them one on one depending on the duration of the activity.
The worksheets we worked on today reiterated the lesson of the main idea. Students had to delineate the components of the articles. By deconstructing a composition, the students reinforced their understanding when writing their own compositions. Before going over the answers to the worksheet questions together, I asked them to summarize the main ideas of the article to me. I intentionally did not read it to see if they could effectively communicate the main idea to me. This was a challenge. By looking at context clues in titles and sub-titles, we were able to write down some solid main ideas. I was pleased because the reading level of the article was very advanced.
One grammatical example used frequently in this article was phrasal verbs. These are difficult to explain and there seems to be an infinite amount of them so we did a short exercise on examples of phrasal verbs and what they mean. I compared the literal meaning to the suggested meaning of the verb phrase by acting the phrases out like charades.
Towards the end of class we complete a crossword puzzle, allowing students a reasonable amount of time to complete the puzzle. During this time I tutored a young man that joined the class late and needed to catch up. Then we went over the answers together, again discussing any words that were confusing. Each student read a clue, and said their answer. Then I asked some type of question afterwards as well such as "can you spell that?", "can you tell me the opposite of that?", or "can you use that in a sentence?". From observing I learned that interaction is more important than just spitting out answers. The discussion is what makes an impression on these people.
In the last 15 minutes of class I let them continue working on their writing assignment. I asked for two more paragraphs to be completed by Monday. Some were eager to hand them in today and let me read them over the weekend. However, I told them to at least edit their grammar and spelling if they couldn't think of anything else to add. On Monday we'll divide into small groups and have a peer editing session.
The best part about today? Everyone saying, "have a good weekend, Kim!" on the way out the door. They like me, they really like me.
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