# data[].attributes.headline
Hi, I am Buket Kaymaz from İstanbul.I am an English teacher in Esenyurt. I was really looking forward to having this training and felt amazing after the first day. Our facilitators Fiona and Burcu gave us a warm welcome and we had fun activities for getting to know each other. My favorite activity was "actionbound" which includes interactive group activities and tasks. Other activities about reflective thinking were beneficial for me to apply them in my classes too!

# data[].attributes.subject
Hi, I am Buket Kaymaz from İstanbul.I am an English teacher in Esenyurt. I was really looking forward to having this training and felt amazing after the first day. Our facilitators Fiona and Burcu gave us a warm welcome and we had fun activities for getting to know each other. My favorite activity was "actionbound" which includes interactive group activities and tasks. Other activities about reflective thinking were beneficial for me to apply them in my classes too!

# data[].attributes.body
We had 4 great sessions about "speaking and digitalisation" today. Our main concern was talking about the common problems in our speaking lessons and finding some solutions to them.

In my opinion, we have 2 common problems that needs tobe solved. 1. Our students want to speak in class but most of them are afraid of making mistakes. 2. Our students don't say much in the class. We mostly think they're shy but this problem is also related to the first one. They can be both shy and afraid of making mistakes.

Possible solutions that we found about them: For the first problem, we can give those messages that making mistake is a part of the learning process- it shows that we ARE LEARNING AND DOING A GREAT JOB and it is quite normal to make mistakes.Also we can give positive feedback and praise them. Using group /pair activities might be helpful too. For the second problem, we can find interesting topics for our students, encourage them to discover their own talent/ interests. We can assign them roles in a group work. In addition to those solutions, we can use interactive games (wordwall, quizziz, spin the wheel and answer the questions) to make them get involved in lessons

# data[].attributes.body
Today, we had sessions about "listening and instructions" with our facilitators Fiona and Burcu.We started the day with a fun warmer called "parasite" and I loved it. In session one we mainly discussed the possible problems that we might have while having listening lessons and tried to find out some solutions. Of course we enriched this session with fun activities :)

In the second session, we talked about the preparing a listening lesson and stages about it. Also, to emphasize the importance of planning the "active listening" lessons, our facilitators showed us new activities such as class memory quiz and picture description. I am going to use "picture description" activity with my 5th graders by doing some adaptations for their levels.

In session 3, we talked about the authentic materials and their benefits for our listening lessons. I have already using 'voscreen' website for my classes and I have learnt new websites from my collegues too. They are: https://lyricstraining.com/ and https://www.elllo.org/ I am planning to use them in my lessons.

The last session covered giving instructions and we planned a warm up activity with our groups including planning to give "clear" instructions in our lessons.

I am going to end my journal by answering the questions that Fiona asked us:

1. In my lessons, I prefer using authentic materials and I try to find activities from other sources too because the activities in coursebooks are not sufficent enough. However,I HAVE TO use the ones from my coursebook either, because of the curriculum.

2. Today's sessions about developing more active listening skill will be very useful for my classes. As I mentioned above, I am going to use 'picture description' activity with my 5th grades as they love drawing so much. With this activity, I can manage to have a fun lesson and help them to improve their listening skills.

# data[].attributes.body
Today, we prepared a group poster based on our course book for grade 6. We chose the unit "At the fair." There wasn't any warm up activity for pre stage so we designed a presentation using visuals and used a website for a virtual tour: https://www.disneyland-360.de/tour/

For the while stage we used the tasks from the course book: 1) Gist task was for matching pictures to paragraphs 2) Detailed task was answering the comprehension questions. Since the questions were 'WH', we differentiated them and used yes / no questions for less abled ones.

Again, the book didn't have a post activity so we designed two different activities:

1. We asked them to fill a chart for a travelling to a fun park for each they (for more abled ones).

2. We paired less abled ones with more abled ones and asked them to do a a role play activity. According to the activity,one of them will reserve / buy a ticket for a fun park,the other one will sell the ticket and talk about the activities inside.

# data[].attributes.body
We started the day with a grammar session today. First we talked about the ways of teaching grammar and differences about them: implicit teaching vs. explicit teaching.I liked the way teacher presents the context within a text or uses visual materials so that the learners discover the form themselves. This way is really ideal but unfortunately coursebooks and the curriculum that we need to follow make it really difficult for teachers. The last activity was designing an implicit grammar lesson with our groups and I really enjoyed it. We took a video to create a context for comparatives and combined it with the guided discovery steps. I will use it when I go back to my school.

In vocabulary teaching session, again we talked about designing effective lessons. In the last session Fiona and Burcu showed us really nice websites that we can use for teaching/revising vocabularies. I have already been using game4esl but my new favorite one is educaplay.com. It's a website that has many games for vocabulary teaching. I will definitely use it since my 5th grades likes playing digital games so much! :)

# data[].attributes.body
We discussed the assesment and planning a proper PDC session on day 7.

1. I must admit that assesment process is a problem in our education system. It changes almost every year and we try to do our best to adapt it. For instance, this year we need to have listening, reading & writing, and speaking exams in two weeks and besides we have to catch a very strict curriculum. It's really hard to do them both.

Also, as teachers we ignore "self assesment" in classes. Today's sessions reminded me of the importance of self assesment. We don't consider them as a part of a lesson but we should do. Again, we tend to ignore self assesment because of the 'heavy' curriculum.

2.Self / peer assesment can solve the local problems. Students can take the responsibilities of learning. In additon to that, when they apply the peer assesment, they can see their own weak and strong sides too. By doing this they can help teachers to handle the assesment problems. Of course as teachers we need to monitor them carefully otherwise they may not be objective enough.