Reflective Journal Entries

ENTRY 1

Feb. 15th, 2016
In this class, the students of sixth grade learnt how to write big quantities, taking into account that previously they had looked for the writing of the numbers (100, 1000, 1 million). The teacher did three examples on the board. Then the students were asked to write the quantities written on the board. The students worked actively. It was easy for the majority of the students to write correctly big quantities, for some others it was somehow difficult. Most of the students showed to the teacher what they had done. As a reward the teacher gave 5.0 to the ones who had every quantity written well. For those students who had errors, she gave them the chance to correct such errors after had given them feedback. The students showed a very good disposition for the class and they were motivated to write the quantities correctly due to the grade given. 


ENTRY 2
Feb. 17th, 2016
In this class 8th students participated in a competition. The competition consisted in write correctly in English, three given sentences using past simple with regular verbs. The first 5 students who presented the sentences correctly, got a 5.0. The students showed enthusiasm in the class, they wanted to get a good grade, so they wrote quickly taking into account the explanation about the topic. Most of them participated actively, and a few others just did not worry about to compete. The activity was developed into three rounds. There were students who got 3 times a 5.0 and that made that they felt motivated to show their answers. In order to bring more opportunities to other students, the amount of notebooks checked increased every time; at the beggining the teacher checked just the first five notebooks, but after the third time, she checked ten notebooks which made that most students had the chance to get a good grade. Most of the students enjoyed and participated in the activity but some others didn't, so in a next opportunity it would be necessary to find the way to involve to every student in order to every one of them have the same opportunities than the others. 

ENTRY 3

Nov. 3rd 2016
In this class, 9th grade students were divided into two teams. Each team received a set of cards. Each card contained a word. The students had to order the words in order to form sentences in present simple. There were seven sentences in total, but they had to choose between two words that were colored in green and purple. The objective of this choice was to see how well the students used the structure of the present simple in its three forms, affirmative, negative and interrogative, so for example the students had decided between DO or DOES, DON'T or DOESN'T, live or lives, etc. They couldn't look at their notebooks or cellphones, also they had to work as a group in order to make desicions together taking into account the opinions and knowledge of each other.  The group of the girls order most of the sentences correctly but the group of the boys didn't. I think it was a disdvantage for the boys to work together because, although they like English, it was difficult for them to remember the grammar rules, on the contrary, the girls showed a better appropriacy of these rules. Next time the activiy could be applied taking into account the skills of the students in order to  make a balance between them and that both groups have the same opportunities.