Unkotare
Diamond Member
- Aug 16, 2011
- 129,808
- 24,902
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Interesting class this morning. I barely said a word the entire time. The kids did great. Every day when the students arrive for class, the first exercise is in a tray by the classroom door. The students know to come in, grab a paper, put their cell phones in their backpacks, and put the backpacks in the designated spot at the front of the room.
The day's first task was a cloze exercise - a pretty tough one for the level the students in this particular class were at. Unbeknownst to the class, I had hidden all the answers in various places around the classroom. Once one student noticed this, the class quickly formed themselves into a circle (rearranging the desks and all) and started working together to figure out where each answer belonged. Most of the students are native Spanish speakers, but not all, so in consideration of their classmates they all spoke English with each other almost all the time without being directed to. It was interesting to see some students emerge as leaders organizing the work, while others enjoyed being more physical going about the room searching for answers, and a few who were content to basically be workers transcribing the correct answers when agreed upon by the group. This went on for a while. When all of the sentences had been completed, we went over them together, with each student taking turns reading a sentence with the answer. They got almost all of them correct. The fact that the students organized themselves independently and worked together to solve a problem was really impressive. These are good, smart kids.
The day's first task was a cloze exercise - a pretty tough one for the level the students in this particular class were at. Unbeknownst to the class, I had hidden all the answers in various places around the classroom. Once one student noticed this, the class quickly formed themselves into a circle (rearranging the desks and all) and started working together to figure out where each answer belonged. Most of the students are native Spanish speakers, but not all, so in consideration of their classmates they all spoke English with each other almost all the time without being directed to. It was interesting to see some students emerge as leaders organizing the work, while others enjoyed being more physical going about the room searching for answers, and a few who were content to basically be workers transcribing the correct answers when agreed upon by the group. This went on for a while. When all of the sentences had been completed, we went over them together, with each student taking turns reading a sentence with the answer. They got almost all of them correct. The fact that the students organized themselves independently and worked together to solve a problem was really impressive. These are good, smart kids.
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