Y llegó la última observación entre Jessica Church (IES Sierra de Ayllón) y Raquel Calleja (CEO La Sierra), con un día intenso cargado de actividades comunicativas, dinámicas y diferentes.
Hello everyone!
Raquel explained that she had created the activity after students asked in-class about texting in English. I thought she chose the perfect moment to connect the two ideas!
Hello everyone!
As Maria and Raquel have already mentioned, we had another great morning together--it was extremely productive, as I was able to not only learn from Raquel in-action, but also ask Maria questions throughout our time together.
As usual, Raquel prepared classes that were dynamic and kept the students engaged with the learning process. The first group that we saw was 3º E.S.O., and the topic that they were reviewing was "conditionals". After a quick review of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd conditional, the students watched a short clip of the (fantastic) film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: the car crash scene.
It was only about three minutes long and allowed Raquel to focus their attention on the 3rd Conditional, which they are having more trouble with.
The students then worked with a tool that I had never seen before--a video activity from islcollective.com, where they watched the same scene from the film, but the video would stop and in order to continue they needed to answer a multiple-choice grammar question.
What I liked most about the activity was that students were able to work at their own pace, and that the activity was well-made and on a website that I already use frequently! I was just unaware that this type of activity is available, and I'm really excited to see what other options there are available.
In the second class, which was 2º E.S.O., as Raquel and Maria have already mentioned, we had some really great Valentine's Day dialogues that the students had prepared, plus a photocall. My personal favorite was a group of three boys who had taken the creative liberty to include a birth scene--it was pretty hilarious (c:
For the second activity the students used Valentine's Day-related words from hearts that they had created using the website "wordart" (another new resource for me! https://wordart.com/)
The students chose five words from the hearts (they were already on the wall, as part of the photocalland time expressions to create a story in pairs, which they they read aloud to the class.
Finally (I don't know how we managed to do so many activities!) Raquel let me lead the students through a really fun process of decoding "text messages" in English. I was really impressed that the students were able to figure most of them out!
Raquel explained that she had created the activity after students asked in-class about texting in English. I thought she chose the perfect moment to connect the two ideas!
Thank you to Raquel and all of her fantastic co-workers for everything, and for Maria for all of her additional ideas about organizing materials and getting students involved. I have learned so much in these visits--I'm excited to have Raquel come to be part of my classroom!