A perfect dinner!

Another weak is done! The time is really running fast and it's all coming to an end soon. Well this weak nothing new really happened in our courses. You can read my course description down in another "indlæg". This "Langauge Change" course is very difficult, but exciting to see how the English Langauge has changed through time and the different terminologies for the different influences and changes.. Quite exciting but as i said it is also difficult..

This week i was teaching again in the 3th grade in the school. I used to teach in this class now and i have adapted the classroom enviroment and created a safe enviroment when i am teaching, so the children also feel relaxed when i am teaching, so i am really glad this. I was teaching about different kinds of transports and how you get around. It was a exciting lesson where the children could learn the different words for the transports and also define if it was on land, in air or on water.

Yesterday, Sami and i, were invited to a dinner at our practice mentor (Kathleen) to her place. Our School mentor was also coming. It was a nice dinner, we had spicy carry chicken with rise and chocolate mousse for dessert. We stayed there for almost 3 hours and talked with our mentors. It was a nice dinner and they are very kind. Sami and I concluded that we are very lucky that we chose Zurich.

All from me now

Alen

The child's joy is the World's joy

Hallo alles zusammen :) A little german can't hurt..

Well, not really anything new to tell about the courses as they are running as i described before.

- Well, this course Multilingulism is quite exciting. Especially when you are living in Swizterland. Switzerland is a very billingual country as they have 4 offical langauges(German, French, Italian and Romanic) and these langauges have different dialects depending on which part of Switzerland. So sometimes german speaking from Zürich have difficulties by understanding other German speakers from another part. So we are learning on the fact of being bilingual and taking a lot of examples from Swizterland which is perfect example of this. And a guy from my class is a rapper and is in a upcoming band(LDDC) in Switzterland. They are 3 guys(a Dj , spanish rapper and english rapper). The guy from my class is rapping in English of course. They are very bilingual band as they rap in different langauges and he is going to make a presentation about his Band. They also had a rapper that was rapping on French but he died. So this is a song they made for his memory. Tunicolo, listen to it!

- I had a presentation in the course Children's Literature. I had to present a children book and tell about which criteria the book is using according to the list we got from our teacher. I presented a book from a russian author (Valery Carrick) "Picture Folk-Tales". These book is something i can suggest to other teachers. All the different stories can be used for a whole lesson. It involves a lot of moral values and this was also the big plan from Valery Carrick. He heard the stories as a child so it had a big influence on his growing up. The stories contains animals who are speaking and behaving like people. So it is a fantasy world, but the children can really learn from this experiences of the animals and therefor a teacher can use it as teacher material in some context. The adequacy of pictures is perfect and it gives the child a perfect space for it's imagination. The book is for small children(If english is their mother langauge). But for danish children it is possible from 3rd-6th grade. It is important for us as teachers to give the children some books they can enjoy. If a child is enjoying , it's surroundings will be happy. Thats what i mean when i say that "A child's joy is the world's joy"


These week my practice was just observation. Only thing i can say is that i miss ice-breakers and or some active activities in the classroom. MOVEMENT!

Alen Mandzo

Mentor Visit!

This Tuesday was the day for Kathleen (My mentor) coming and observing me and my teaching. I was going to teach in the 6^th grade today in an English lesson of course. The first lesson the pupils in the 6^th grade had music, so Kathleen and I were talking about my lesson plan in the office and about some practical things.

Well, my lesson started at 9:00 in the morning and my lesson was about the Swizz Alps. Today we were going to focus on special activity in the Alps. They were going to read a text and see a movie about the first men to climb the famous mountain in Zermatt called Matterhorn, which of course is in Switzerland. Afterwards they would an activity attached specially to the movie. It was sentences which they needed to distinguish if it was right or wrong. I gave the children an Agenda so my instructions were clear and the children were obvious about the structure of the lesson so they weren’t confused in any time. The learning objective in this lesson was to know the history about the first climbers in Switzerland, but also to know how to use key words and the importance of this. My lesson included both the receptive and the productive skills. But the receptive skills were more focused in this lesson then the productive, because there weren’t some much time for follow up on the movie and to do some writing especially. The receptive skills went into the same activity. The introduction to the movie was a text and I played an audio file from the books CD, which was the same as the text in the book. I told the children that I wanted them to listen on the pronunciation of the words they didn’t knew and then ask for the meaning afterwards. Then they read the text after listening to it. I gave number heads at each table, so I picked the readers after the number heads, so it didn’t knew who I was picking. It also gave the weaker students the chance to practice their reading skill. As for the productive skills, there was a bit speaking after the movie where I asked them questions about the movie and we kept a discussion for quite a long time and the children were using full sentences so it was successful. As for the writing the children practiced by writing key words which they used for picking the right sentences and also discussing the movie. I would in another lesson do an extension for the writing part, where they are going to retell the story in with their own words and they would specially need the key words for these. After the lesson Kathleen, Gunnar and I used the break to evaluate my lesson. Kathleen mentioned that she liked my pleasant communicative style and my English. I had some clear instruction, but we agreed that the key words could be more focused so they had some specific details to pay attention to and write down. The lesson also had a good structure and my way of explaining by using gestures was excellent as I don’t really speak the German language and I went through the lesson without using help from Gunnar to translate the words to German. She also liked the method Number Heads and I can only thank my teachers at my home institution for this. She said that she never saw this method before. A thing which is also going to by my goal for my practice here in Switzerland is that I need to have variety in my in my attitude. I need the children to know that I am the boss of the classroom. I need to find ways to get the children to get quit when they are too loud. Another goal is also to find several of different praising when they pupils are doing well, because I used it in my lesson and she liked it and would like for me to find a lot of these praising words. All in all it was a good lesson and it went smoothly without any real problems. I can also thank the pupils for this, because they did very good and were very active and kind to me. 

All from me 

Alen

Learning strategies!

This week vas very exhausting because of all the courses and homework we have to do and not to mention the practice placement! But it is better to get used to it, because we are going to work like this until the end of our abroad work!

I was teaching in the 3th grade in english this week.

In the 3^rd lesson I was teaching the 3th grade in English. It was a good experience again and still challenging in a way because their mother language is German. I was teaching them about senses as their theme was “Our five wonderful senses”. In this lesson I was focusing on the touch sense (Fingers), but the learning outcome was for them in fact to learn some important adjectives in English like “it is cold, it is warm”. I used pictures so they could understand did adjectives and a lot of body language, because I wanted to keep the CL in English. But we also translated them into German afterwards so they were 100 percent sure what the adjectives mean. It took a long time to teach them the adjectives, but it is normal in TEFL in a 3th grade in Switzerland. Afterwards they were working with the adjectives in the worksheet and I was correcting them when they finished it and gave them other advices to adjectives. Ursula liked that I took things and allowed the children to feel on them so they really could understand which adjectives we were talking about. She also said that she liked my humor and that It gives a good classroom environment because small children feel safe when the teacher allows a little bit of humor and is funny also.

Also wanted to mention something about the school and how it works. in the 3th grade, where i am spending the most time (also going to teach the 6th grade), there is 21 pupils. 8 boys and 13 girls. They have an "Elevbog" which works the same way as in Denmark, but in the small grades they get grades from an early age. Two times a weak the children have the day off at 12 and others days at 15. A important thing to mention is that their lunch break is from 12 to 13.30 and the children NEED to go home. For those who can't go home, because the parents are at work, there is a place next to the school where those children can spend their lunch break. But they can't stay at the school. A thing i don't like is that it is usually divided that boys work with boys and girls work with girls. In the 6th grade i experienced that they divided the class in two in a French lesson, so the boys went with a male teacher and the girls with a female teacher. Couldn't see the point in that! This school is a primary school, which is from 1st grade to the 6th grade only. There is another school which is a secondary school(7-9 grade), so they couldn't really understand when i said that i was becoming a primary school teacher and that i would like to also teacher from 7-9 grade maybe. :) But all in all i'm of the opinion that the pupils are very well-behaved children and that they know what is right and wrong, so it is very easy to work with them, when looking on behaviour.

Just wanted to mention on of my courses which i like the most and is most relevant for me! It is the course i have on Wednesday. It is Learning strategies and it is so relevant and exciting. This week we learned about the direct learning strategies. We sat in groups an made practical examples on how to give strategy instruction to the direct strategies and how the children can use them. I found it so excellent that i am going to use a memory strategy instruction in my next lesson in the 6th grade in English( My mentor Kathleen is also coming to observe me so wish me good luck :) ).


The professors and teachers at our courses are very nice and kind jus to mention :)


All from me now!
Alen