This week has been a short one because of Korean Labor Day, which means I have only 2 periods to teach the lesson instead of 3. This particular lesson is four pages longer than all the previous lessons. There is a lot of vocabulary in this lesson. It starts out with the reproduction of moss, and deals with seeds, spores, flowers and finishes with pine tree reproduction.
Something happened yesterday when all the teachers and students were outside practicing activities for the Children's Day carnival, which will be on Saturday morning. The two Korean homeroom teachers were explaining the activity to the Ss, when a gust of wind blew up and sent a mini tornado of pine tree pollen all over the poor teachers. About 20 students looked to find me in the crowd and yelled "spores". I had been teaching them about sexual and asexual reproduction in plants, but they haven't learned about pine trees yet (It's pollen which is sperm, therefore sexual). Thanks God for the visual aids :) In addition to this I have been buzzing around my classroom acting out the pollination process and using a ppt of pictures explaining this and getting one S to ask another S the question. (TSST)
Every week I have to make a homework sheet of review for the lesson. Marking this weeks homework sheet gave me some really great feedback of what the Ss understood and what needed reviewing. I was able to go through this information in my next class, but this means I have to make up time next week which is also a short week. I found this week to be very frustrating given that I had to do a GW activity and had precious little time to do so. This week has not been so great for some of my students, given the volumes of vocabulary this lesson had. Lots of TT and IRF and not great lessons = VFT (Very Frustrated Teacher)
That's nice that you are able to create, assign and check your own homework assignments for them as I'm sure it gives you a nice view of what they've grasped and it gives them some extra exposure to the vocab so they don't forget it! I'm forbidden from assigning homework because of their absurd amounts of hagwon work, so they often forget the stuff we've learned the previous week and need to review quite regularly..
ReplyDeleteI guess there are pro's and con's to the homework issue. Pro's being good feedback on the lessons I teach, but the con's being the big pile of papers sitting on my desk waiting to be marked on Monday :( You get the journals to mark, which is also one heck of a lot of work. That's an interesting little cultural tidbit "you are forbidden to give them homework"
ReplyDeleteI think the week was worth it just for the 'Spores' moment! You know Daniel, there are websites (I think Edublogs is one) where you can have a claqss blog that includes a 'quiz' generator, and the blog can check your homework for you that way... would work for some assignments, though not all.
ReplyDelete