Methodology - Week 13 – Reflection

For this weeks reflection I put together some video I took of a lesson I taught my 3^rd grade classes. The target language was focused on articles of clothing and the imperative sentence “Put on your _______”. In order for the class to have meaning have use to the students, I organized color prints of a baby cartoon monkey that the students would have dress up. More specifically, the students would take turns commanding each other to add an article of clothing to the monkey.

We worked through the vocabulary first with a music video and range of PowerPoint(PPT) slides. The PPT slides also involved some fun recall games that I used to test the students memory of all the articles of clothing. The students (Ss) loved the games, and I feel this lowered their affective filter for improved TL recall.

I was hesitant to show another activity section in my reflection as the last one showed my class as being somewhat out of control. I don’t won’t to give the impression that I’m helpless the classroom and let all the students run riot all the time. I’m not and they don’t. I just wanted to illustrate the point that certain activities (like board games for example) are a particularly negative influence on general order in large public school classes.

However, with this exercise, when there was no competition in the activity i.e. no “you sink – so I can swim” mentality, the lesson was a lot calmer.  I’ll be the first to admit that the lesson was not as fun as some of my other PowerPoint game lessons, but more learning probably occurred with this competition free type activity. There was less cut throat competition, less pushing of the smartest kids on a team to answer all the questions, less screaming and crying about points or cheating. Given that about 90% of all my class game activities I have archived are competitive in nature, gives me pause for thought. I should probably start looking for less competitive sources of “edutainment” to add to my teaching files.