I currently have instructional control over 4 of my host teacher’s 5 English classes and took over the 5th this afternoon. The students range anywhere from 12-16, and there is one particular age group who I have in two separate classes once a week, but see them as a group in the middle of the week which makes for a very odd dynamic in lesson plans. Generally, I do an activity involving both English and arts so that the students can get a break from the structured grammar and so that both classes can do something together as they’re at different levels of English (it’s a very small school so we kind of have to make do with this sort of thing sometimes). These past two weeks on Tuesdays when I have those two classes combined, I’ve been working on the “one-word” project with them. This is essentially used as a way to set and remind students of goals at the beginning of the year, which is one reason I decided on it, but the other reason was to help my students connect singular English words with broader meanings and understandings of them. I gave them a list of words that they might consider, and although a few did choose a word from that list after looking it up in the dictionary, many knew exactly which words they wanted to use which was really cool to see. To get to this point, however, I had to do a lot of scaffolding and goal setting. I had my students list out their goals (both career and personal), then list the things they needed to do to achieve those goals, and finally, choose an English word that reminded them of the things they need to do to achieve the goals. The result was twenty-something students making these really beautiful representations of their goals while simultaneously playing around with the versatility of the English language. (I’ve included a photo of the students and myself with their work which I did have permission to take as the student’s parents sign a photo waiver at the beginning of the year)

With the class I took over beginning today, there is a huge mix of abilities as it’s an elective English course. I also get a ton of freedom in what I do with them because it’s a course meant to engage them in the culture surrounding the countries which use English and help them to practice their conversational English, so there’s not too much grammar instruction going on. Today, since Thanksgiving is Thursday, I decided to give them a little historical background on the holiday as well as a modern day perspective on how we celebrate (football, food, friendsgiving, and the parades). After doing some work with that, I brought them back to the overarching theme of the holiday which is being thankful for the things and people that surround us by doing a “thankful tree”. I drew a makeshift tree on the board and gave each student six multicolored paper leaves. Each student needed to write “I am thankful for” followed by something/one they’re thankful for and a reason why they are thankful for that thing/person. When they were done, each student shared one of their leaves before taping them all to our tree on the board. I tend to believe that older kids enjoy simple activities like this as much as the younger ones which these activities are normally catered to, and this was an example of that. For 30 minutes, the students were engaged and working on their leaves and were proud to put them up on the board. And now we have a really beautiful blackboard for the remainder of the week which is always a bonus!