TPR, Field Trip, & Smartboard

This week was a great one for observing and participating in interesting activities in my practicum experience. I feel like I learned so much!

In class one day, Mrs. Collins did a TPR (Total Physical Response) activity for a vocabulary lesson on jobs. I was really excited to observe this because I have heard a lot about TPR but never really seen a lesson featuring this concept in action. The lesson was awesome! She first showed a slide for each job (cook, teacher, hairdresser, etc) with a picture and then showed the students a movement associated with it that the students had to do. For the cook, they would mimic stirring a spoon in a pot of soup. After they did it multiple times, they would associate that movement with the job. After they got through all the jobs and their specific movements, she would close the slide and just say the name of the job and the students would do the movement. Then, she would switch it up so that she would do the movement and the students would say the job. I thought it was so cool to see it in action. It is activating their psychomotor skills as way to learn. The activity also accessed higher levels of thinking. Later in the activity, they had to close their eyes and listen to the teacher say the word and then do the motion so that they weren't relying on the other students for the right answer.

On Friday, the class went on a field trip to the fire station and got to ask questions about what the firemen do and other things that they wrote, see their living space (kitchen, bunks, and living room), go inside the fire truck and try on their gear. It was such a great, fun experience for all of the kids. I will try to post a picture of one of the kids wearing the fire gear because it was adorable.

I also made a smartboard activity for the intermediate writing class (I do not sit in on this class). Every week, the students do an Article of the Week, which is a small magazine with articles on different topics. This week's articles featured a quincenera, information about an actor, information about volcanoes, etc. I remember them from when I was in grade school! Mrs. Collins had me research activities for writing that could be done with the articles and put them on a smartboard slide for the students to complete. I found some really great ideas and writing prompts, and I chose the following questions:

Write down five things that you learned from this article. What do you think was the most important? Why?

Use the following sentence starter and answer the question using information from the article.
-I was reminded of...