Teaching Practice

A requirement for Obeservación y práctica is to tell a story to young learners. The chair offers two possible places where to tell your story. I was assigned Children I and II at Cultura Británica. The class was team-taught and my partner was Laura Cortés. We first observed the group and my first reaction was "how lovely! they have a good command of English and understand almost everything." We chose the story of "the Gruffalo" by Julia Donaldson. The kids were very much engaged in the story and participated in the activities. I really really enjoyed the experience but I won't tell much since you can read the reflection.

REFLECTION ON THE TEACHING PRACTICE

                I am going to reflect on the teaching practice delivered on the 17^th October together with María Laura Cortés at Cultura Británica. I am going to concentrate mainly on the planning of the class and on team work.

                To begin with, after María and I observed the courses we were assigned to, we had to think of a proper and engaging story to tell. Our first option was “the Gingerbread man” but as it is a well-known story we decided not to use it since students may have known it. Therefore, we chose “the Gruffalo” a really nice story by Julia Donaldson. The story is about a very smart mouse who invents a terrible creature, Gruffalo, to avoid being eaten by other animals. Finally, the creature exists but the mouse manages to escape. As a pre story telling activity, we decided to ask students questions about monsters like “do you think monsters exist? What are the characteristics of monsters? Are foxes afraid of monsters?” In so doing, we activated students’ schemata, introduced some vocabulary items and set the atmosphere for the story. In the while story telling stage, we planned to tell the story by making the different voices of the different characters thus we reproduced the dialogues with different voices for students to realize who was talking. In this particular stage, I believe we could have included some repetition patterns on the part of the students since the story had many repetitive patterns like “a gruffalo?, what’s a gruffalo?” However, students understood the story perfectly and were engaged and motivated too. We could prove this in the post story telling stage when students answered the checking comprehension questions successfully. At the beginning, the questions demanded more elaborated answers students weren’t confident enough to answer so we re-elaborated them and they could answer them perfectly. After that we divided the students in three groups: the foxes, the owls and the snakes and played a game. Students had to solve a jigsaw puzzle and say what it was. By doing this we were checking the vocabulary introduced in the story. The children liked the game and showed command of the language and the vocabulary taught.

                As regards team work, I felt comfortably working with María Laura. At first we didn’t know each other since we are not classmates but we got to work jointly in a really nice way. We complemented each other and divided the preparation of the activities without problems. We also managed to rehearse the story whenever we could since both have different timetables and October is a complicated month.  All in all, it was a very nice experience working with her since we’ve both learnt a lot from each other and from the experience.

                To conclude, the experience of telling a story was a very positive one and I felt really comfortable with the story, the students, the place, the partner and the performance. I’ve really enjoyed this experience since I love working with young learners, having fun with acting or making them have a good time.