Day two

Today was quite a fruitful day. After yesterday lessons I was a bit confused and I didn't know what to think about the course.
Nonetheless, I loved nearly all of today's lessons.
In the first session of Language Development, we started reviewing yesterday's vocabulary with a nice warm-up: we were in small groups of four and the teacher gave each group an envelope with a set of words and expressions we dealt with yesterday. In turns, each student took a label and described the word/expression to the rest of the group. The rest had to guess it. Although I already knew that activity, I remembered how much I like it and I will also use it with my students.
After the short warm-up, we continued with the activity on word formation that we hadn't finished yesterday. Today we dealt with other ways of forming new words, such as proper names, new meaning for old, acronyms and abbreviations. As yesterday, I found this activity very interesting as a teacher but I don't think I'll ever use it with my students. I learnt loads of new blended words which are so fashionable and which Spanish students usually like, so I'm glad the activity was so helpful and informative.
To finish the first period, we did a speaking activity called Alphabet Island. The teacher had set the letters of the alphabet all over the classroom's walls and she asked a question. So we had to stand up and place ourselves under the first letter of our answer. Then we discussed our ideas with those people standing close to us. It was a good activity but I found it a bit hard for my students, as we weren't given any help. If I adapt it to their level (with instructions, prompts, useful expressions, etc.), I feel that I can also use it with my older students.

In the second period we had Language Development again. This time we started with a speaking and listening activity. In pairs, we

Chatting with my classmate Janny

were given a set of questions about our family relations. We had to chat for a while, asking and sharing personal information. And then the teacher played a recording about Frida Khalo and her family. No innovative approach to a listening but my partner and I spoke a lot and discovered we have many things in common.

We ended the morning lessons with another speaking activity. In pairs again, we were given a piece of paper with 5 possible topics for debate. Each of the students chose two and then we had a five-minute conversation about the chosen topics. What I liked best of this activity was the way the teacher organised the pairs: he gave us the pieces of paper with the topics to choose from and each paper had a number on the bottom right corner. I had number 3, so the other student in the classroom with number 3 was my partner. It was fun to look for a partner all over the classroom, teenagers will like it a lot.
We finished the morning session with a video about DNA, connected somehow with the family relations we talked about in the speaking activities. Here you have:

In the afternoon lesson my group split in three: those students who had CLIL, those who had Technology and those who had Methodology. I'm in the Methodology group and we are only 6 students. Today, the teacher devoted the lesson to drama and we loved it. We did nine activities somehow related to role-plays, dialogues and drama. They were mainly warm-ups, most of them focusing on attitudinal intonation, but I liked them a lot and I found them very interesting. I feel I could use most of them with my students, younger and older, even without adapting them to their level. I had forgotten how important it is to start or finish a lesson with fun activities in order to keep the student's motivation in the long term.
As it is impossible to describe all the activities, I will describe the ones I liked best. In the first activity, we were given a simple dialogue and we had to memorise it but we also had to change our intonation according to different moods (angry, romantical, sad, happy, fearful etc.) or contexts (a disco, the airport, the boss at the office, etc.). Then we performed the dialogue twice changing intonation, so that the rest of the class saw the different moods we wanted to convey.
To finish the day, we had an improvisation activity in pairs. Each student got a stripe of paper with the starting sentence of a conversation. Then they chose someone in the group to continue the situation for a minute. It was very simple but affective at the same time. We laughed a lot and we finished a long day in a good mood.


At 7:15 pm we had a cinema session at school. We watched The Words. I hadn't seen it before and so I enjoyed it a lot. It is an excellent way of learning and spending time with our partners outside the classroom because we have been together for two days and we are getting to know better.