CO #3 Jude

I finished my trinity of classes on Monday with Candace Walter's group one reading class at 11 a.m. Oddly enough, I think I had picked the perfect three classes to attend with regard to my future of teaching English in Korea. The first class I picked was a group 1 grammar class, the second class was a group 3 composition class, and the last one was a group 1 reading class. I don't think I will be teaching to higher levels while I am in Korea, so the variety of primary level classes was very helpful to me.

Ms. Walters behaved in a way that was very similar to Ms. McHarek's class. She knew her students were from very different cultural backgrounds and were at a lower level, so she adjusted her class to suit the needs of primary level learners. She spoke at a slower and clearer rate than Ms. Ramos (which suited her class), and she definitely had the respect of her students.

To begin, so re-arranged the classroom to be one giant table (which I really liked), and then they went over an article that they had been assigned to read for homework. The article was very small, and was approached in a mixture of top-down and bottom-up techniques. For example, she asked questions from a questionnaire that were pretty basic (directly from sentences in the piece), but then she would break down certain problem sentences into grammatical parts. I wonder if she was communicating with Ms. McHarek, because their lessons actually blended quite nicely into one and other!

After this activity was complete, she passed out the penguin reader books we looked at in class, except these ones were about the movie with Brendan Frasier "The Mummy." What ms. Walters would do was start the movie where the class had left off, play a certain portion, and then the class would read that portion after having seen the movie scene. This turned out to be an excellent choice, as everyone was very engrossed in the movie. It had action, was funny, and followed the book very closely, and I could tell the students were having a lot of fun watching it.

Although this movie may be a little to frightening for younger students in Korea, I would really like to do this exercise because it simply keeps the students interested, and they feel a sense of intrinsic accomplishment having read and understood the events in the book.