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