Class 10 Esma Gülşen İŞLER by Esma Gülşen İşler

Day 1

islereg — 2022-08-19 21:36:47 UTC

I like the activity we did in today's session to get to know each other by drawing animals. Each drawing represents one of the letters of our names. I think it is a fun and communicative activity for my primary school students. They revise both animal vocabulary and their alphabet knowledge. However, they might not have the encourage to draw an animal and they might not find an animal for each letter of their names. As a solution, we can suggest them to draw just the animals they know for each letter and they can write the letters if they can't remember or find the animals.

The tools we have used in the session (Kahoot and Actionbound) have pros and cons in my local context.They are both fun especially for kinesthetic and social learners.With the stress free atmosphere, they can feel comfortable and easily focus on the activities. However, my students don't have phones to join these activities. The other problem is the number of students in my classrooms. It is hard to control crowded classrooms while using the tools like action bound.

Burcu A.Ekinci

burcumss — 2022-08-20 20:28:52 UTC

Esma, thanks for your comment. Yeah one of the most common problem is having crowded classes which makes the situation more challenging to plan and implement different ideas for teachers but you can try some of the ideas to foster your students interests and engage them with short small group tasks .

Have your ideas about teaching young learners changed in any way? If so, how?

islereg — 2022-08-20 21:09:07 UTC

I love teaching young learners so I always try to choose and use activities paying attention to their age and level. However, in today's session I realized there are some aspects I should pay more attention. These are the things that I will change and be careful about in my classes from now on:
*I'll give short and clear instructions and ALWAYS use English in my classrooms.
*I'll use more drilling activities and chunks to develop their pronunciation and speaking skills because I know children have a good `ear` :)
*I'll be careful while choosing the worksheets I'll use in the classroom. I'll check if they are natural and child friendly and if they have a meaningful reason for talking and social language.
* I'll be more patient about their behaviour in the classroom

1- Is it possible to match the stages of this session with the stages of the PDC cycle?

islereg — 2022-08-21 17:43:30 UTC

1- Is it possible to match the stages of this session with the stages of the PDC cycle?
Yes, it is possible. These are the activities I remember from today's lesson:
*The 'the onion ring game(inner-outer circle)' we played in this morning match with the warm up stage
* Making lesson plans to develop oral skills match with engage and share
* preparing posters, presenting and explaining them match with reflection and evaluation part

2- What changes would you make if you were working with teachers from your PDC on using dialogues more effectively in the primary classroom?
I would try to create a meaningful context for the dialogues and find related pictures to make it more simple and clear for the students.

3- What needs to be adapted most in your coursebooks to help children improve their oral skills?
In our coursebooks there are mostly songs as a listening activity.These songs aren't natural and most of them are not attractive. in addition to this, It should be better if they add also chants and tongue twisters. I think there isn't enough pre- and post listening activities to motivate students for a listening activity.

4- How can PDCs help you with that issue?
With the help of PDCs, I can learn new varieties of listening activities from my collegues or how to adapt rearrange the listening activities in the coursebook for my students.

1- Do you think shared reading is a suitable procedure to use with L2 children? Why/Why not?

islereg — 2022-08-22 20:21:10 UTC

I think it is. Shared reading is an excellent way to develop L2 students' reading and language skills. Reading the story and acting some parts of it together with the students encourage them to read and keep them active in the learning process. They see the teacher as a model so reading would be enjoyable. Meaning must come first so shared reading help students to understand the meaning in the texts with the support of the teacher.

2- What do you think? Which opinion do you agree with most? Why?

I agree with the third opinion. If we want the students aware of the link between sounds and letters, teaching phonics is a great way. It helps them to pronounce the words correctly. But when we think about our classrooms , it is impossible to use this method all the time. However it is not correct not to teach phonics any more. I think we should teach it time to time and draw their attention especially to common phonemes and letter clusters in English to develop their pronunciation skills.

1- Are there any tips or techniques from the sessions today that you could use to manage your PDCs positively?

islereg — 2022-08-24 19:02:18 UTC

To manage my PDCs positively, I would use impreratives while dividing them into groups and give clear instructions. We learned lots of grouping techniques. For example; giving names of the animals or fruits names, letters or numbers to the participants. I would also use counting down to get their attention. Lastly, having a group leader as in the game we played 'stop the bus game' (choose a captain) help me to hold their attention so I can manage easily.

2- Are there any other elements of classroom management in your PDCs that you will think about?

Giving responsibilities to the participants and setting up the time are the most important things that I will think about in my PDCs. To be able to build self esteem and confidence , I will try to not put pressure on them to speak.

1- Has your view of assessment changed? how?

islereg — 2022-08-25 21:41:16 UTC

1- Has your view of assessment changed? how?

islereg — 2022-08-25 22:07:20 UTC

Yes it has changed. After we did the assessment session, I realized that the assessments I use in my classrooms are very traditional. They generally don't have a context and meaningful reasons. I use product-oriented assessment tests and they can't measure the students' language ability. The checklist for Child-friendly test will help me to create process-oriented asssessment tests. I'll try to be careful with overpraising and immediate correction! I'll prefer delayed correction. I also like traffic lights and multiple choice card tecniques as assessment for learning. I'll try to adapt and use them in my classrooms. For example; after teaching action verbs and to my 2nd grades, I can use traffic lights to check their understanding. I do the action and if they know the english of this action they go to the green light if they don't they go to the red light. Then the students in front of the green card tell the correct word. I can use multiple choice card activity to check their understanding of a reading passage.

1- what do you consider the greatest benefit of being in a Professional Development Community for teachers of English in your local context?

islereg — 2022-08-26 08:42:51 UTC

In my local area teachers don’t have anywhere they can use English to improve their language skills or anytime to come together with their collegues.With the help of PDCs, they can socialise and improve their language skills by using English in the sessions. They can also refresh their teaching knowledge, find solutions to their problems by coopareting with their collogues and sharing their ideas . PDCs will create the most suitable environment for them to do all of these effectively and give them the chance to take away some of the ideas to their classrooms and adapt it for their students

2- How do you expect the PDC session in the programme would help you deal with possible problems about planning and conducting PDCs in your teaching context?

Every session we had in here was an example of a real PDC session so I can easily plan my PDCs remembering the things we’ve done in these sessions. Also, the draft we have and guidance of our mentors will be helpful in planning.

We talked about the possible problems we would have in our PDCs, try to find solutions to them altogether and shared our ideas so we are aware of we can have some small and big problems in our PDC sessions but we can easily deal with them because we have this power ☺️