Week 1: First Impressions

Before starting my practice period, I went to the school to present myself and to know the school and the teachers that worked there. The English teacher, Bea, was completely kind from the start. She offered to help me in whatever I needed, and she tried to summarise how she worked with the students. I felt really confortable with her. Therefore, my first impression was amazing, and I quickly realised that this experience was going to be really useful for me. 

So that, I arrived the first day completely enthusiastic. I was eager to start the lessons! The English teacher made me present myself to all the students. This brief introduction of myself, in most of the cases, caused the pupils' attention and many questions of my personal background emerged.

The first day I started to become familiar with the routines of the school, and with the methodology of the English teacher. I realised the diversity of the classrooms and how complicate can be to approach all the multiple intelligences. The teacher showed me how she worked with each group and what projects was she following.

In the case of 3rd and 4th grades, she was working with corners with the whole group. When she had the whole group, she was starting to present a new topic, related with a theatre play that the students were going to watch in a few weeks. The topic was: "The Lochness monster". There were some activities, songs and vocabulary established to work with them before watching the theatre play.

In the case of 5th and 6th grades, she was also working though corners when she had the whole group. She was also finishing with them the project "All about me", a poster with some personal aspects. She was explaining them how to present the poster, regarding some aspects such as pronunciation, position, attitude and so on. She is also starting a new work: "The timeline". This work has the purpose of integrate sentences of past, present and future to do a personal timeline.

The second day I went on a trip to "El Parlament de Barcelona". It was a nice day and I had the opportunity to know better the pupils of sixth grade.

The third day was very hard, the teacher had a lot of work and I tried my best to help her. I also gave her some resources that I had from the subject "Didàctica de la Llengua Anglesa" and she really liked them. There was also a meeting with the rest of the teachers to decide some methodology aspects for the carnival project. We also started a new topic with the 5th grade related with a project of the school: the five senses. The purpose of this topic is to make the pupils know the main parts of the body that are involved in the five senses and how to name them.

On Friday morning, the English teacher was backing a group of second grade. I went with her and I help some pupils with difficulties to do a composition in Catalan. Then, we did corners with the fifth grade and I recorded some pupils on their oral presentations of a project "All about me". I tried to remember them the main aspects to take into account in order to do the presentation properly:
- Look at the camera
- Speak clearly
- Show the poster while you speak
- If you make a mistake, you can solve it:
        - Saying sorry and correcting it
        - If it has been a long time ago, just follow
- Closing sentence: "Thank you for your attention"

In the afternoon, we continued with the five senses project. It was time to do a  "hearing activity", which consists in listening to some sounds and decide the name of the animal/person/instrument and write it down. Children enjoyed a lot during the activity and I considered it a really useful resource to introduce new vocabulary and to use the hearing sense.