Saturday 18 February 2017

Paper Plates!
The sun is shining and I am running around town looking for paper plates. Why am I looking for paper plates? Materials to be used in a lesson activity on prefixes and suffixes. I have been to ‘Super China’ which sells every object ever made in China stuffed onto shelves.  It was here I found lollipop sticks which I have used in other lessons. Which is why I thought this would be a good stop for paper plates. Alas! Not so as the trend appears to be plastic plates and this is no use to me as I need students to be able to write on the plates. My next stop is the Vidal supermarket where the lovely young cashier always greets  me a polite and formal Buenos Dias. Again no paper plates to be found. I can’t spend all my spare time looking for class material. I am going to have to improvise as I have lessons to prepare for and a busy day on Thursday leaving little time to prepare for lessons on Friday. If I don’t prepare, knowing myself as I do, I will get myself into a tizzy and be stressed out and not sleep well.

One observed lesson over and done with earlier in the week. This went surprisingly well. The students, listened, understood the activities, spoke English and were positively engaged. I even managed to impress the teacher who was observing so much she took a video of one of the activities in full swing. The rest of my lessons for this week appear to have gone downhill.  Classroom management seems to have escaped me; students don’t comprehend the task in hand which leaves me re-explaining everything as I monitor the class. Lack of materials; it took me nearly 40 minutes to print a sheet of A4 containing games material and technology not working. Not to mention no paper plates! This afternoon all my students kept on quizzing me for the word they were searching for in Spanish. I think they genuinely thought I was Spanish guest speaker who spoke English like a native! Once again I have evaluated and am working on solutions to the issues. Hopefully this will make next week’s lessons easier.

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