Week one is done, time for a siesta!

Week one is now complete, and I am pretty tired but excited about working in my school and the relationships I have formed so far. Coming straight from training in Chester was great as I could think about what I had learned when meeting and observing the children at my school. They range in age from 4 to 16 and I am teaching 9 to 16 year olds in six different classes, so my classroom management strategies vary quite a lot for the different ages.

I have to admit I was pretty nervous on the first few days. It’s the equivalent of starting a new job in a school of 400 plus where you feel confident talking fluently to only one percent of them. My Spanish is a little rusty and my Valencian is non-existent but I have enjoyed the challenge of communicating in Spanish with my colleagues. I have had a full school tour (including lots of cheek kissing which I was not prepared for), set up a printing account (which isn’t easy in your first language) and finally located the ground floor of a somewhat hidden playground, all in my broken Spanish.

I jumped straight in and started teaching on Tuesday, enjoying being in front of a class but struggling with remembering students’ names. I have 170 to learn! They are not used to having lessons entirely in English so there is work to do on improving their confidence in their language abilities without translation. One difficult aspect is the range of abilities within a class. In all classes, there are students who are using different books as they are retaking an academic year, or are new to Spain so are focussing their efforts on learning Spanish. Learning who these students are, what level they are at and how they like to participate will help me when planning group activities so I can involve everyone and help develop every student’s abilities and confidence.

I have also been running sessions with the teachers in my school which has been really enjoyable. Two of them are trained to teach CLIL but want to gain confidence in speaking and I have been asked to help teach Maths and Science lessons in English which should be fun! It’s been interesting for them to take the role of student but also valuable as I can tailor the sessions to their needs and challenge myself to design sessions suitable for teachers which is a rarer aspect of EFL teaching.

I ended the week with my observation; a speaking lesson with my oldest class of 15 – 16 year olds. They are very talkative, though mainly in Spanish but they seemed to enjoy the different method of teaching without desks and books, and all were practicing the functional language we had learned. It was on the topic of persuading others to participate in a sporting event for charity which is a topic they engaged in, and the element of competition really pushed them to use a range of language to persuade each other.

I am looking forward to a lie in tomorrow but then it’s back to the books to plan for the week ahead.

Hasta luego!

Yas.