Reflection #2 (Spring 2019)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Maria Lorena Flores on March 15, 2019 at 5:32am

Dennis:

I personally enjoyed your activity from the colors to the content of your lesson, the presentation was very engaging, and although reading and writing in another language can be challenging I found the way that you and your partner created was very interesting. The input was a very important part of your lesson and was made meaningful and anyone can relate to having someone far away. The letter your provided was simple yet it had a lot of useful information that would help students connect and relate with the topic you chose for lesson.

Permalink Reply by melinda vargas on March 19, 2019 at 8:08pm

I enjoyed your presentation the letter activity was interesting. As the teacher mentioned today maybe an e-mail of Instagram post to the athlete would have been a better choice. As stated by VanPatten, “Classroom learners get exposure not only to conversational language but also to the language of written tests, speeches, and other types of planned discourse. Instruction in the classroom heightens learner’s awareness of grammatical form and structure.” I believe you accomplished that task in your lesson plan.

Permalink Reply by Maria Lorena Flores on March 15, 2019 at 5:23am

Our second micro-teaching activity my partner and I created was focused in the teaching of possessive adjectives in Spanish, which can be slightly different in English. Our goal was to enhance the learner abilities to express possession and use it in a correct way in sentences or dialogs. We chose some activities to get the students to be comfortable with using this adjectives, one of them was by giving them examples of sentences that referred to family and things around us that we use in a daily basis. For example: This is my book (ese es mi libro) That one is your book (ese libro es tuyo), proceeding our lesson we gave examples for them to complete the activity with similar sentences.

Another activity consisted of arranging the words that were not in order in a correct form. While the activities were productive, we missed a few points like the presentation which was pointed to us, which is very important for the beginning of any lesson in order to lead right into the actual lesson to accomplish a more effective way of learning for our students. What I would have changed about the presentation is showing pictures to relate the lessons topic and in a way attract the student and alert of what is coming next and be aware of the students comprehension to continue to the next phase. Overall we were very happy with our presentation with minor mistakes that could have been prevented.

Permalink Reply by Selena Jaquez on March 23, 2019 at 10:38am

Hi Maria,

I really like the idea of showing pictures that relate to the lesson topic. As educadors, it is important to incorporate it in our daily lessons because it helps students understand better and helps them catch on quicker. As Lee and VanPatten explained in chapter 2, using visuals and drawing on the board help the learners “see” what they are learning. Providing visual facilitation not only helps draw in learners, but makes it easier for them to remember the concepts they have just learned.

Permalink Reply by Selena Jaquez on March 16, 2019 at 1:01pm

Hello everyone,

The micro teaching activity that I presented along with Fazima was a great experience, it gave us an idea of what strategies and techniques we could use in order to succeed in the future as educators. The activity objective was to introduce vocabulary by utilizing pictures of clothing we wear on the different seasons of the year. We chose some activities to engage the students in the lesson by giving them different tasks such as label the clothing and classify the seasons according to the vocabulary learned in class. I found this activity relatively strong because it is a simple task in which students can recognize words directly with its meaning and not with a translation. In other words, instead of just knowing a vocabulary words such as “la bufanda” and what it means in the source language they can visualize the word with the picture which would help them completely understand the word better. This would allow them to feel more confident when creating sentences using those words.  As teacher, it is important to use binding in our lessons because some students are visual learners who need to see things in order for them to understand.

Something I would have done differently is to show videos in my lesson in order  to demonstrate how people from different countries wear the same clothes throughout the year as is the case of Dominican Republic. DR is generally hot with tropical temperatures all year.

To incorporate more culture in this activity I would have asked students to name what is the most popular clothes they wear in their culture on the different seasons of the year. (274)

Permalink Reply by Maria Lorena Flores on March 19, 2019 at 7:57am

Hi Selena, I truly enjoyed your activity, it was very engaging and fun for students to recognize and relate with the topic about clothing, which is something we use in a daily basis, and could be used also for shopping and common communication, the pictures were very colorful and attracting to the viewer, the techniques used in the practice was also very well done and very simple.

Permalink Reply by melinda vargas on March 19, 2019 at 8:00pm

Hey Selena,

I loved your presentation it was very interactive. I believe by asking students what they wear in their countries would have made this presentation even more meaningful and interactive to find differences or similarities throughout the classroom. I believe it is hard to address clothing items by different names because it may confuse the learner however keeping the different name sin mind in case someone brings it up is a great idea.

Permalink Reply by Evelyn Salazar on March 26, 2019 at 9:16pm

Hi Selena,

The lesson that you and Fazima presented was comprehensible, motivated and colorful. The vocabulary that you guys choose was accurate and relevant to the topic. I love the fact that you did very good job using visuals as Lee and Vanpatten mention in the book, exploring the nature of simplified or modified input and the use of visuals can make input comprehensible.

Permalink Reply by Evelyn Salazar on March 18, 2019 at 8:46pm

For this activity my classmate and I did a lesson about grammar. It was interesting to see how we are supposed to teach grammar including culture, communication, community, connection and comparison. We did enjoy integrating a game to our lesson and have fun while we teach. I think a lesson with only the necessary information, will become strong for learners, not so much information to not get the learner overwhelmed but the necessary to teach the language. In our lesson I would have done different the part of the culture instruction, and some of the words that we use for our lesson. I think I would choose a topic, a theme, a country and a month for every lesson and think about how much culture the lesson will teach the student. If the content of the lesson will show and connect to spanish culture will be more powerful and meaningful to the class. One instruction that I will be different for the future is to use diagrama the end of the lesson instead that at the beginning. I will also incorporated an hand out activity for the students and more visual objectives, and make sure I use the three P’S. Also this activity gave more knowledge about teaching and creating a lesson, its challenge me to get experience in front of a class as a regular teacher. In this area still room for me to improve and hopefully I keep learning more each day, and continuing to develop skills to write a good lesson for the class.

Permalink Reply by Geomyra Granados on March 31, 2019 at 8:00pm

Hi Evelyn I really liked how you and your partner used the lesson to include communication, community, culture and comparison. As we have learned throughout the semester, it is very important to address all the points that it takes to show the students the 5c's. By bringing all the 5c's into the classroom we are allowing the student to communicate and interact with one another. As educators it is very important to give our students the chance to know that there are different cultures throughout our lesson and therefore they will have a sense that learning Spanish is not just about the grammar like we saw in one of the chapters being a misconception. I honestly enjoyed the idea of you and your partner. However,  I think that for the future will be better to focus the lesson a little more on culture since like said before we often lack on showing the culture while teaching grammar. 

Permalink Reply by melinda vargas on March 19, 2019 at 7:50pm

The micro-teaching activity that Karolina Custodio and I created and presented in class had four objectives students will be able to describe their family, understand how to create a family tree; creating parent-child interaction to assist them in school engagement, explore different family trees of their classmates, reinforce other skills such vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

I found this activity interesting and strong for our class because it was based on a cartoon many have seen in the past and because it is meaningful. According to VanPettten in chapter 11 comprehending written language, states the importance of activating appropriate schemata by bringing students knowledge to bar on the process of comprehension. For this reason, we presented the Simpson family and then reviewed by asking students the name who the characters were in the family tree. For example, Homer is Bart’s dad. To include more reading comprehension one thing, I would have done differently due to differentiating instruction reasons is include more written activities such as Based on the photographs you chose for your family tree list at least three important fictional facts you would like the class to know or provide a story and have the students list three important ideas from the reading. Another thing I would have done differently is instead of going straight to the powerpoint I could have created a pretest in kahoot to explain family terminology to know what students know instead of assuming as stated by VanPetten on page 232, this would also be a great way to know what students have learned in the class. I would have also incorporated more culture into it by comparing El Chavo del Ocho cartoon version, with the Simpsons or comparing Spanish Simpson version versus English Simpson version differences in names and story lines. Another thing we could have done is have students work on their family tree in class instead of for homework and present in class to have a comparison of families in the classroom and see differences as well as similarities throughout different cultural backgrounds. 

Permalink Reply by Dennis Galicia on March 21, 2019 at 10:32pm

Hello Melinda:
I agree with you. The discussion presented on chapter 11 by Lee & Van Patten provides an interesting discussion regarding schemata. In addition, it provides an interesting set of tools regarding the 3 stages of reading.
Moreover, I would suggest that you refer to chapter 2 of the book. Chapter 2 focuses on providing helpful concepts regarding input for L2 learners.
Personally, your presentation was perfect. Your activities were sequenced correctly. Lastly, for culture, I think that culture should be our starting point when designing our lessons. Subsequently, I would suggest that you stick to 3 activities after your presentation because by constantly thinking about different activities we tend to get confused.
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