April 11th - Classroom Activities and Oral Practice

This workshop was given by Alessandra Maria Amarante Masson, she teaches at Colégio Jesus Maria José and Peanuts English School in Poços de Caldas. It was the best workshop, in my opinion, she is an excellent teacher and we could see in her eyes that she loves teaching.The activities involving listenning, grammar and mainly speaking cause we spoke english all the time!!! These activities were excellent to aproximate all the students, improve our English and exchange ideas and experiences. The immersion happened in April 12th and was given by Alessandra too. It was wonderfull!!! She's a funny person and everybody liked her!!! I really enjoyed all the activities that we did during the day!!!

She gave us an activity to do in class, each group was asked to discuss about one of the set topics: “Teaching Grammar”; “Teaching Vocabulary”; “Teaching Listening”; “Teaching Writing” and “Teaching Speaking”. My group discussed about “Teaching Writing” and we made a step's list, after we had to read an article related to the topic discussed, written by Jeremy Harmer and post it in our blogs.

Step's list:

• Discuss the points with the students;
• Write the keywords on the board;
• Ask the students to write a composition with the subject;
• During the writing the teacher can help the students with their douts;
• After the students have finished, the teacher can showthem the mistakes and give a chance to correct it.
  

The last step was very discussed by Jeremy Harmer, he said that the correction of student's work is an important part of teacher's job. One thing that can be very demotivating is when the students get homework back completely covered in corrections. The teacher have to consider carefully how he is going to deal with the mistakes he finds. Some teachers use written codes (V for vocabulary, S for spelling and G for grammar). Students then know what to look for when they come to re-write their material.