March 15th and 22nd - What is the time? - part 1

5th grade

I am feeling disappointed with my students' reading skills. I know it is the pandemic fault, but I can't help feeling surprised in a negative way when I give them a reading activity. The goal of this class to my only 5th grade group was to teach the time, so I started the class doing an oral review of the numbers from 11 to 60, to think about the minutes, too, even though I did not plan to use minutes in that class, on the 15th. Then I asked if they had watches, but no one had, nor telephones, as they are not allowed to bring it to the classroom. So I wrote some times on the board and asked them "What is the time?" or "What time is it?".


Before distributing the written activity, I explained that we had to read and complete the header first and asked two students to help on paper distribution (they love to do that and to erase the board). Before starting the exercise, I always ask someone to read the explanation and everybody to pay attention. I always think that I am writing a good and clear explanation, but, when many of them ask me what they have to do, I feel frustrated, because I think that I was not clear enough. 

When I was correcting them, I saw answers like "It's numeral o'clock", "One", "One o'clock", "Three it's clock". Usually part of the class finishes fast, part not so fast and part is very slow and sometimes does not finish because they can't or because they are not interested or they are distracted. I would like to do more activities with the "fast ones", but I have to help some of them. For me, it is a pity, because some students could use the class time better, but I am only one and they are usually 20, so I have to accept that.

I thought that two classes about the time would be enough, but while teaching the second one I noticed that it would not be possible. This was my plan for the second class about this topic: 

I started with the song part and, just by the end of the song, some students told me the song was about numbers. Well, that was a good beginning, even though I was expecting more understanding. I asked them to take the activity we had done in the previous class and listen to the song again. So I felt that everybody could understand. They were interested when I asked them to try to understand the part of the class in which they say 1:15, 2:45, 3:05 and 4:30.


In the previous class I noticed that they do not know about analog clock. So I explained on the board with some examples and asked them to transform the times of those digital watches into analog watches. Gave them around 10 minutes and corrected on the board, asking the students to come and draw one analog watch on the board. The 50' ran like that.

Feel like I must stay on this topic for one or two more classes. 

Comentários

Postar um comentário

Postagens mais visitadas deste blog

February 7th to 9th - getting to know everybody

Imagem
  Here in Mariana, for the kids classes we still do not have a book or brochure to use with our students. Last year we had, but in 2022 not yet. But even if we had, I do not think it would be ok to use it in the first week. So I watched some youtube videos to give me some ideas of games or songs to use in the first week, to get to know each other. As I was expected to have 23 different groups of kids, I decided to have the same class plan for all of them, making small changes according to age. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXvhy8hvFk The first two days and a half of classes were really good and they seem to receive my approach well. In almost all groups they asked me where I was from or if I was from Brazil. One of them thought I was from China. It is funny how the very young look at me around the corridors or the canteen, like I was an E.T. I am trying to keep this magic, so, every time I need to talk to another teacher (in Portuguese, of course) I do it in a very low voice...
Leia mais

May - Sports

Imagem
  4th grade I introduced the names of the sports in a previous class (the last 10 or 15 minutes), by playing hangman with them. So I used only cognates, not use any translation or explanation.  Then I prepared written material, with vocabulary and translation. The wordsearch was ok. It was easy for many students, but not so easy for a few of them, who do not yet know how to read lower case. This is one of the reasons that I always ask them to do written activities in pairs, so one can help each other (sometimes this help is like copying the other one’s answers). For exercise 2, they took more time to answer and they looked a little tired. Maybe I should have not done 19 items, but 12 or 14 max. For a 9 years old kid, it was too tiring. But I wanted to use the space I had on the paper, so I always use the max I can. Some students were really smart, and they knew that if they paid attention in a key letter, like the M in IGNROOMT, they would find MOTORING easily. But some of the...
Leia mais

Situations in which I spoke Portuguese

Imagem
First week, all groups. This story I already told here.  I had planned a drawing activity for all groups. For 1 st  and 2 nd  grade, I asked them to draw what they wanted to learn in English along the year. For the 3 rd , 4 th  and 5 th , what they remember from the former years. They had to draw the vocabulary they remember. Those are very difficult to explain only in English and gestures. So I typed this instruction in Portuguese on Google Translate and clicked on the sound symbol, so everybody could understand the activity. For the next classes, I will try to plan activities that I would not need something like that to make them understand me.  March 31st, 4th grade 3, a class about numbers. One of the students said "It is very easy. Don't you have something more difficult?". I did not answer anything and he was already annoying me, cause he left the classroom twice and was talking too much. Then he told me that he did not know how to say 21 (twenty one)...
Leia mais