Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Week 5/6
Well, we are on the home stretch for the classes at the elementary school. Monday's class has one more week and Tuesday's class will finish on March 23. This week, I saw a lot of progress in the kids' speaking ability and retention in French. In both classes, I heard the kids talking about how they were using French outside of class and how they remembered things like the alphabet, numbers and talking about "I'm a girl", etc. Monday's students remembered the song and eagerly sang along. This shows that even if we don't think the kids are paying attention or participating the way we want or expect them to they are learning and engaging with the material. Bon travail!
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You have mentioned that they learn even when they learn unconventionally. This prompts a question for you in your role as the observer. When we, the teachers, get flustered or impatient, have you noticed a similar reaction in the kids? I was thinking that maybe the unexpected learning comes from the incidental things we do because they are unstructured, which the Monday definitely likes, as seen by this past class time.
ReplyDeleteI think that learning comes from both the structured and the unstructured parts of the class. Certainly the incidental language use and the adapting of activities is a part of that as well. Even with a structured activity, students can get something different out of it than the teacher has expected (ie. they connect with the material in a different way, like the boy who zeroed in on fruits during the food lesson). As for your question about being flustered or impatient - I don't think I noticed these same things in the kids. I think - and you probably have seen this too - that when an adult gets flustered or impatient, sometimes this can encourage the "pushing of the buttons" behaviour that we see in some of the kids. As we have discussed, this is a hard thing to control with kids who don't want to pay attention!
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