Week 1

So I picked up my first class this week, second period Spanish 2. The kids have been behaving pretty well for me so far, no real issues to deal with. Funny enough, the first day teaching went really, really well, whereas the second day had a melting point before the students and I got on the same page.

The first day was a 5-stepped-vocabulary day. It seemed to me that the kids really did learn a lot on that first day and they somewhat enjoyed the lesson. (Either that or they thought I was crazy, pero a mi, no me importa as long as they learn). We learned all the vocabulary from the new chapter dealing with self preparation and then the students used the vocabulary in a circumlocution activity.

Then came day 2: a PACE lesson on reflexive verbs. Here is where we butted heads quite a bit. The students are used to getting grammar lessons in English and I wasn't going to speak English. I started asking questions for the co-construct phase and thinking back on it, if I had been in their seats, I wouldn't have known the answers to my questions either. I had also created a prezi on reflexive verbs which had all the right information (key word all as in WAYYYYY too much). The kids felt overloaded and just got lost. But then after we finished the paragraph of very non-concrete information on the first slide and moved to seeing the rules applied, I actually heard some students saying "OHHH!!! I get it!" as the light bulb went off for them. Thankfully my University Supervisor was there that day, and along with help from my CT, we revised my lesson plan and I retaught it fourth period, completely doing away with the prezi.

Now maybe I'm one of those people who has to see both extremes before I can get it right because for some reason, even after watching my CT teach the lesson and trying to combine hers and mine, I just completely skipped explaining how to use reflexive verbs at all. I tried to just show the students without providing any guidelines whatsoever. But at least now I have a pretty good idea of what will cause information overload and what is just not enough to work with.

So after seeing how lost the kids were due to a lack of guidelines, I kind of just put my lesson plan down and explained it to the kids as if they were learning it for the first time in language that was slower and clearer (hey! That's exactly what they are and exactly what I should have done the first time. I don't know why I didn't understand that to begin with). I wrote an example on the board and explained it, moving the pronoun to the front or leaving in the back on the end of the pronoun depending on what the situation was. Then the kids came up to the front and practiced with it. Some of the kids actually left smiling and saying they were surprised they actually understood something in Spanish (which made me feel really good). However, there were a few kids who still didn't understand, so I will have to work on finding a way to reach those kids.