Hey Scott, hey Sam,
this is my report on what we did in Eilenburg for the last two days.
On thursday we started with a short introduction circle where everybody had to introduce another student to me and to the class.
After that we had a short revision of what the group did, so far. In other words, we repeated the simple present by building positive and negative sentences as well as questions.
As the following, I explained the grammar of the present continuous. We also did a little present continuous brainstorming: “what is happening in the class room, outside, at home or somewhere else at the moment?”. In addition to that we also created positive and negative sentences as well as questions by using the present continuous.
After that we did a short quiz in class which is called “Riddles of the alphabet”. We also talked about and practiced the differences between ‘some and any’ as well as the differences between ‘since and for’.
At the end of the day we went through the worksheet ‘occupations’ from the ESL employment handout selection.
To sum up Thursday, I have to say that I realized that in this particular course we do have students with very different levels of English. This fact makes it quite hard to always keep the group together. So I was thinking of giving some of the students additional materials to work on in class. But all in all this is a very highly motivated course which goes through the tasks very fast.
On Friday, we really had tropical temperatures in our classroom which made working quite hard.
Anyway, we started our day with the question: “what did you do yesterday after class?”, which everybody had to answer on his/ her own.
Even that i told the group to do this task in simple present some of them were able yet to manage it by using the simple past. So I decided to introduce the simple past to all of them, afterwards. Therefore I handed out the simple past grammar explanation worksheet by ESL.
We then did some clozes on the whiteboard. We also did clozes including a mixture of all tenses we have learned, so far. After that, we continued with the employment worksheet by ESL (I left copies on the teachers desk). I gave some additional, higher level material, to Ruth because she seemed quite bored. I presented her a text on the Coke vs. Pepsi wars, also by ESL ( I also left copies ). Afterwards the group played a little game where every student had to explain two words to the group and the others had to guess which word the explaining pupil was looking for ( like Tabu ).We then continued with the difference between who/ which/ whose. We did some examples on this, as well.
Even the weather wasn`t the best for learning English the group again was very quick by rushing through the tasks. I also really got the feeling that they are all making progress and they have fun.
Best regards
Markus