Reflections

As I have mentioned before, sometimes it is very hard for me to think specifically about what happened during my previous week of my practicum experience and write critical observations and reflections because I 1)Do not like simply sit in the back and take notes of what is going on, appearing to be disengaged with the classroom and 2)I have become very familiar with the classroom environment and students now and tend to see the daily operations less critically than I probably should. I think this has something to do with the age level of the students. Perhaps if I was with an older group of students for whom motivation was a bigger element of their language learning experience, I would see more theory-based moments that reflect back to the critical topics we discuss. However, I do not intend to mean that my experience is not a valuable one that I don't enjoy--my time so far at Kingsley has made me want to do something that I previously thought I would never, ever want to do--teach at a junior high school.

Anyway, I feel that this week I engaged in a few memorable activities with the class. On Friday, we went on a field trip to Schnuck's Grocery Store in Normal. Previously, the students have been learning the names for different fruits and vegetables and how to describe their color, shape and size and how to tell if they like that particular food or not. They used a worksheet that asked them such questions as "Find a fruit you don't like. Describe it." And they went around looking at different fruits and vegetables while the teachers periodically asked them questions such as "What color is this fruit?" etc. We also bought a few fruits and vegetables that they hadn't tried before to learn more about them. I thought it was a very fun learning experience for a field trip.