A note about Feb. 23rd

At the beginning of class last week Kizuna and I gave our presentation on Oral Language Development. I think that the discussion portion of our presentation (which followed Kizuna's introduction on speaking difficulties for non-native English speakers) went better than planned. We didn't cover all of our discussion questions, but I think that the class came up with some very good points about speaking that I hadn't anticipated (i.e. body language and outside factors that affect our speech or willingness to produce it). The discussion went so well that Kizuna and I were unaware that our time was almost up and so we had to cram in our last activity. This definitely had an effect on how we gave our instructions and how the class perceived/understood the activity, but even so I think that the activity wasn't a total loss because it got the class to discuss some important ideas about how people communicate from more than one point of view.

After that we went to the GLL. Since many of our computers weren't working properly we ended up doing two activities. One was an assessment of two ESL students from a video and the other activity was to create activities for our students using props and games from the library's teaching section. I think that it was interesting to see how each of the lessons had to be changed last week because challenges like this often come up in classrooms and we have to be prepared to adjust our lessons and even throw out some of our planned activities.