Teaching Unit | practicumvporfolio

My Teaching Unit

In this Practicum V it is time to focus on the English subject, since I have been following the English teacher and learning from her.

In this particular school, primary students follow the textbook course content mostly, this is why, I have been asked to work those specific topics.

During 3rd trimester, the 6th graders start a new unit which is supposed to work the past tense of the verbs to be and can specifically. Nevertheless, I am going to go a little bit further and introduce more verbs and include both regular and irregular verbs.

In order to work this content and other topics I have decided to frame it into a context in whihc they will feel more motivated and engaged. How so?

Well, since this course is the last one for them (6th grade) in the Primary stage and they will have to move to another school so as to continue their studies, I have thought, with my classmates' help and contributions, to enclose it in a project called My life Timeline.

This project consists on the creation of their own life timelines, so that they can remember and share experiences lived throughout their lives. It is a nice way to recall memories from their own life stories and others lived together. I personally think that is a great form to strengthen their relationships.

This teaching unit is designed to take 6 sessions and according to their English schedule, there will be 4 whole-class sessions and 2 of half-group. This way, I am going to try tak advantage of the half-group sessions to foster more interaction and conversation rather than more theoretical classes. Indeed, it is a challenge to teach English with the whole group in their regular classroom because I consider that this subject need lots of interaction and room to practice the language. Students need to practice, to carry out group activities in which they feel more comfortable to explore, to talk, to learn from their peers, etc.

In addition, this TU will be implemented in both 6-A and 6-B, which is always nice for me to learn, to realize of mistakes, to foresee possible obstacles... This also means that I will be doing a total of 16 classes during April taking into account both classes.

I want to comment as well that I have designed this TU with lots of interactive tasks, games, ice-breakers activities, etc. The objective is that they build a positive relation with English and to realize that learning is fun and even though it can be a challenge to learn another language, it is a fun adventure to go on and not as difficult as they could first think. Nevertheless, I had these classes when implementing my former TU in Science and they demonstrated to have a good level of English and that they are capable to keep up with classes instructed in English.

To present this Teaching Unit to the students, I'm going to pose the following driving question which will determine the path of the teaching sequence. I want the students to be very active, that they can practice while having fun and learn content that might be useful for them someday. But, above all of that, I want them to builf a strong positive relationship with English, which I believe is essential. Curiosity of learning will define their learning paths.