In today's class we talked about written expression and some activities we can do in class and later expand as writing tasks for homework. Luz made a very important point during this class, which is that now a days it's not common that students have a reason to write outside of an academic environment. The majority of their written communications are Whatsapp messages, or at the most an email. As a result, they don't see the value in this type of communication so we need to contextualize it and make it personal.
I really liked the idea that Luz gave of having them write a letter to her at the beginning of the year and plan to use it in my future classes. This letter can serve as a way to get to know the students and a general "initial evaluation" of their English level. I'm including the instructions she gave for the letter to have for future use:
1st Paragraph: Who are you? What do you like? What do you like to be called? (Nickname)
2nd Paragraph: What is your experience learning English? Good parts? Bad parts?
3rd Paragraph: What are your plans after school? (Do you want to study at university..etc..)
*Students must use present, past, and future
I also really enjoyed the "ode to an object" it was a fun, creative way to work through some of the parts of speech. I'm hoping I might be able to use it with some of my private students because we are studying the transformations of words from adjectives, to adverbs, and it seems like an enjoyable way to work the boring differences of grammar!
The scholastic story starters was also fun. I'm including the link here, so that I have it for future reference. http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/story-starters/
Good overall review of the session. It's a good idea to keep the blog for future reference, as you will probably go back to some of the activities we did in class with your own students. Will be fun to learn how they work!
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