week+3


 * week3 September 15 **

preparation for the practicum in September 19-24 program at the CBNU affiliated university high school How do you prepare for the teaching at the high school? Here, you can upload your instructional ideas and other members will make a comment. This is a practice of collective intelligence. Please help each other to make the instruction better.

Journal for practicum Your experience at the high school will be recorded using the format.

__**Lesson plan and lesson material, Triin Sauer and Matteo Lindner:**__

We were asked to introduce some of our countries' culture to the students, so we have decided to split the lesson into two roughly equally long parts. However, we want to keep in mind that the lesson is also an English lesson and therefore want to teach some language as well. Here is the lesson plan: In the first part, the Estonian part, we focus on vocabulary acquisition and the students' understanding of English sentence structures. This is done through a matching exercise in which the students should find the end of sentences that appear in a [|YouTube-video about Estonia]. First they should try to do it without having seen the video, then the video shows them the solutions. Finally, the teacher gives the solutions and asks some questions to check the students' understanding.

The second part tries to apply the concept of [|Total Physical Response] to a dance lesson. The Waltz is presented as a typical part of Austrian culture. Following instructions like "Push the tables to the side", "Form two lines", "Find a partner", "Form a circle", "Step back sideways with the right foot", etc. should ideally increase the students' English language ability.

__**Practicum plan and powerpoint, Katariina Teder:**__

At first Maria and I had divided the lesson time as the following: - introducing ourselves (2min) - a get-to-know game (~10-15min) - my presentation about Estonia (~15min) - Maria's presentation about Austria (~15min) - time for questions (~5-10min)

We tryed to play the get-to-know game we had planned in the first lesson we taught, but not much came out of that, maybe the students didn't understand the instructions or their English level wasn't sufficient. Also our presentations took more time than we had planned, so there was no time left for asking questions from us. On the following lessons we skipped the game and therefore had a little time in the end of the lesson for questions. In some classes students didn't have many questions for us, but in other classes they had more questions than there was time for them, so I think this is something you cannot really plan, but it's good to have a topic prepared in case there is extra time left (for example in some classes we talked about the educational systems and high school life in our countries).

In my part of the lesson where I talked about Estonia, I went through the following: - Showing Estonia on the map and bringing out the similarity of Estonian map and the world map - Going through some most important facts about Estonia, speaking about the meaning of Estonian flag's colors - Showing photos of Estonia with some additional comments - Speaking about the unique Song Festival tradition in Estonia, showing a video of the song festival - Introducing the Estonian language, reading some most beautiful sentences in Estonian so they can hear what our language sounds like and then teaching the students 3 expressions in Estonian (also in some classes they asked me to teach them some more words/sentences in Estonian) - A quick overview of our most important holidays - Estonian cuisine

My powerpoint presentation:

Maria talked about the story behing Austria's flag, showed Austria on the map, brought out some most important facts about Austria, showed a list of German words that the students probably know as they are the same in English to prove them that they can already speak German:), introduced world famous people from Austria, taught the students a jodeling song and clapping that goes along with it.

Maria's powerpoint presentation:

Looking back I think we both were really satisfied with how our lessons turned out. If I could do anything differently, I would have made 2 slightly different presentations, so I could have one presentation for the first 3 classes and a new one for the other 3 classes, because speaking the same thing 6 times over again got a bit boring for me in the end. I think having the same presentation for 3 classes is optimal, as in the first class you see the response of the students and can make some changes if that is needed for the next classes and in the next 2 classes you can perfect your performance, but the fourth time wasn't so exiting for me anymore and i felt like getting into a routine, so I wished I had had a different presentation prepared for it. Overall it was a great experience and I wouldn't change it for anything!