P4 English

Mrs Muruga decided to give a double period to Melvyn and i to have a feel of teaching a P4 English class. We were given the freedom to do a simple planning on teaching of the topic, Adverb to her class. Met up with her to present her our lesson ideas after our own discussion She was very supportive of our lesson ideas and even gave us more suggestions on how we could improve on it and help us vision how our lesson could tie in with her teachings in the following lessons.

We decided to start the lesson with technical aspects of adverbs such as its function and how adverbs can be constructed and identified in a sentence. It will then be followed by an activity where students would act out some assigned actions(consisted of a verb and an adverb) and asked the individual groups to guess the assigned verbs and adverbs. Then, the class will try to complete and extend the sentences formed from the set of verbs and adverbs.

On the day of teaching, the class was very responsive, especially during the activity. Although the dry technical aspect in the beginning is important, i felt the learning curve really kicked during the activity. I felt that students absorb knowledge in an increasing rate when they going through the learning experience themselves.

I was very encouraged by the fact that some of the "quiet" students were participating eagerly during the activity. Thus i made an extra effort to sieve through the sea of hands and picked them to answer the questions.

I once learned from a leadership camp that as a leader, you have to sustain an energy level that is higher than the rest of the group. I think this applies the same for an teacher. If a teacher's energy level is only at 70%, the class will most likely to response with an energy level that is a notch lower than 70%. That does not mean that a teacher needs to be prancing around the classroom, but rather keeping an good amount enthusiasm and interest in the delivery of the lesson.

To conclude, it was a valuable teaching experience. I am glad to be given such opportunity to deliver a lesson to the class. This will surely build me up for my future teaching attachments.