8th of January 2016 - 22nd of January - several lessons

OK, I got a little behind in writing about my English lessons in those two weeks and I try to remember as much as I can by writing a summary about them. They won't be as detailed as they usually are but I'll have the most important parts in there. I won't sort them by date but by topic to make it easier to follow.

Animal - Presentation
Friday, 8th of January - I went with the class into the computer room to introduce the google translate to them but this was nightmare and I would never do it this way again. Allowing them to write a German text first made everything way more complicated out of the following reasons:

• They could easily copy-paste texts out of the wikipedia in order to make their texts long enough so that some of them turned out to be way to long. Some texts even had those wikipedia links in it... 
• Well google only works, if you enter easy sentences. With those complicated sentences that the kids sometime took out of what ever pages they had found, google was just creating horribly wrong sentences with way to complicated words in it. 
• Another issue was their spelling. The ones that wrote their texts on their own usually made some spelling mistakes which google could not translate. So what google did was to translate part of the sentence, add the original "unknown" word, and translate the rest of the sentence. So it's pretty clear, that those translations didn't turn out like they should have.
• Many realised by reading through the text, that they misspelled a word and just translated that single word in google which made the sentence even worse. Instead of translating the whole sentence again.

So I made these points clear to the class and announced that we would be in the media room again on Monday 11th and that they should have decent German texts ready by then. One boy (as usually) had been finished with the English text already because he did it at home or had it done by his sister or parents... So it was not really as successful as I hoped it would be.

Monday,  11th of January - Again I gave them time to work on their presentation in the media room. They had to make sure to have their texts on the USB Stick to work on at home and to have all pictures printed out that they wanted to have on their posters. The boy who was finished helped the others like all the other kids that finished their texts. By Friday I wanted them to give me all their memory sticks with the English and the German text on.

Friday,  15th of January - The kids worked on their posters. Even though they only had to fill in this fact sheet, glue some pictures on it, and write the name of the animal they didn't manage to finish the poster in that lesson.

Monday, 18th of January - I gave them 15 more minutes to finish the poster and copied them all down to a A6 size.

Friday, 22nd of January - I just handed back those A6 Posters to the kids and they had to formulate a few sentences about the size, speed, weight and live expectancy of their animals.

I realised that I would never ever get them to do the presentation before the winter break and so I announced on one of those days, that I would go over their texts and have them recorded by a native English speaking person and that they would have enough time to practise their texts, since the presentations would not take place before break.

In the meantime I had help from a true angel!!! Kate, our au-pair from the US went through those English texts and turned them into real English texts, taking out all the bad language that google translate had come up with. I have no idea how I would have managed to do that without help. So this is a lesson that I have learnt. I could not do this with long, complicated texts like that. Well on the aims that I have given the students at the beginning of this project I wrote that they were supposed to write a SIMPLE German texts and I think it would have worked with this simple text but since I kind of lost track on what the kids did and since I let them use the computer it all went wrong. So next time I would allow them to research in the internet but then write their own easy sentences in handwriting making sure that they could not just copy. Or I would provide them with lots of chunks in English and had them try to write the presentation in English right from the start.

What we still have to do is to record those presentations and I planned to decode them all. But I have to admit that I don't know when I'm supposed to do that. But it's still my aim because I think that it is really necessary that they understand their speeches... But I might just get them to do this themselves in another Thursday lesson. I could prepare their texts with very wide line spacing and let them find the words they don't understand themselves because it would take me forever to do all those texts myself.

Questions
I'll keep this short because I pretty much followed my schedule about the questions the way I wrote it in one of my last posts. Always on Monday I introduced a new topic, gave them homework for Friday and made some sort of drill where they all had to use the practised topic. I started having some doubt about the effectivity of this way of learning when another teacher told me that they were having difficulties completing their homework but then I was highly surprised how well they did in class. I think the issue with the 3rd person singular was probably the most difficult for them. I'm curious about how they will do next Monday when I test them.

"Have to do" something
We chanted the "things you have to do" several times at the beginning of the lessons and most of the times I made them use the "have to" with their own duties.

Listening comprehension
I made another listening comprehension with the class about one chapter in the book we are reading in German. This time I didn't give them three possible answers but a statement they had to judge with true, false, not in the text. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but I will insert a picture of the chapter when I'm at home. I let them read through the questions and clarify vocabulary. They had become great in asking for vocabulary clarification and I don't even have to remind them to ask in English. I explained the unknown words with other words until they could tell what it meant. Then I read the text twice. The first time rather slowly and the second time in a normal pace. When I corrected the test I realised, that most of my statements were wrong or not in the text. I will make sure next time, that that there are more true sentences too.