Thursday 23 February 2017

The sun always shines on Valencia

While the sun continues to shine, I am not sure I could say that lessons are shining. I find my nerves have not abated as I can’t seem to get into the swing of things and I become nervous and forget my lines so to speak. However this is not stage fright as I enjoy extracting English from the students.
 I feel  I have nailed one classroom management technique – hands up and look around the class. If anyone is struggling with this easy-on-paper technique, I have realised that the key is to make eye contact with any student making noise.  Once eye contact is made with the student they realise their culpability. While I am not suggesting we all go power crazy, it does emit a fleeting sense of respect between student and teacher.

The school has a great atmosphere with an emphasis on learning but with fun activities thrown in too.  All the teachers in the English department are very helpful.  Other teachers in general are very friendly and give me an ‘Hola’ in passing despite that fact I am not the usual teaching staff.
I am not in school today due to exams, but I am busy thinking about how to incorporate visuals into my lessons and am playing around with PowerPoint and finding ideas in general which I hope will engage my class.


Also the CIFIRE project rolls on – with presentations to be given this evening about teaching techniques. So far we have used how to incorporate the following  into lessons: an activity using a smartphone, a house which made from folding a sheet of A4, ways to make the textbook more meaningful, blogs  and  not to mention a host of useful websites delivering anything from a random name selector  to worksheets/wordsearaches and song lyrics…

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