31st of August 2015 - slightly adapted way of active reading

So here comes my next English lesson. I actually wanted to take the Oxford Young Learners Placement Test with the class but there were two reasons why I decided not too.

1. We've not yet been through the whole text with the active listening and I wanted this to be done before taking the test because they should start passive listening as soon as possible. 
2. Setting up the test was not too easy. Good thing I tried it first... 

So this lesson was about the good morning conversation again but I made a mistake. I didn't put the word magnets on the black board as a preparation so I wanted to do this while speaking through the conversation. But surprisingly, some of the kids had already memorised the whole text so I thought to myself, that the whole class wouldn't need the scaffolding anymore. Well it did work, but after the lesson I realised that maybe just the best of the class knew it by heart but most of the others would have needed some help to feel confident. Well I'll hang it up again next lesson and one day it will be just somewhere on the wall.

We sang through the "viva la vida" song again and the kids are really good at it. But I feel, that it's time for a new song...

THEN, I switched to German for just a minute to explain the class, that I'm slightly changing the method of active listening. I handed out a new version of the "shopping for a school camp" text and asked the class to highlight the German version of every word they did not understand in English because this way their eyes will automatically follow the English words and switch to the crutch whenever they need it and by the end, they will see how many words they have learnt.

I changed the way of how I wanted to do the active reading because I felt that it was too complicated for them to hear the text in English, read it in German and in addition to that paint over those words they understand.  This way, they can really concentrate on reading along while they hear me (or the CD) without any pen in their hand.

So the kids read through the story themselves and highlighted every word they did not understand the English version. Afterwards I read through the text 4 times and asked them to listen to the text at home again and again while reading it until they understand it completely. This is their homework until Friday 4th of August 2015.

Well we still have some issues with those Audio data. All kids with iPods, iPhones or any other apple product cannot load it on their player. And I cannot connect them to my iTunes because they are not mine... I tried it with USB-sticks as MP3 files, as MPEG4 files and even with Audio-CDs but it just won't work!! I'm about to buy a bunch of MP3-players myself and let them have them over the year. Maybe I'd need them again in my next English class...