Reflection 7

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

REFLECTION #7 Sept. 29- Oct. 3, 2014 This week we only had two days of class. The reason was because our cooperating teacher got sick and the Doctor gave her order to rest from Wednesday until the end of the week.

On Monday I brought my students a new method to motivate them. I made a colorful felt envelope that would contain the morning messages. I also colored a black paper with chalk that said morning message and I pasted it on the wall next to my student’s display area. Inside the envelope I placed an award for one of my students for doing a great job in his oral presentation.

That student was also in charge of reading the morning message to the class. The morning message letter was a success! The students were very excited with the message and after singing the morning song they all wanted to know what the letter said. It created expectancy in the students and caught their attention to make the learning and teaching process smoother.

Afterwards, I continued discussing with my students the definition of immigration. Then I asked them to take out their homework and mention reasons of why people immigrate. Then I explained push and pull factors. This part did not go entirely as I expected. I had an entire activity planned out for my students. I had placed on the board two divisions of push and pull factors and in the middle there were many reasons for immigration that students had to classify.

After discussing the terms, students did not really comprehend it and I have to say I was a little frustrated because I was really prepared for this class. I even made a drawing so the students could grasp the terms pull and push and explained it in English but did a lot of mimics so they could understand but not all of them did. So I had the students write down examples for both terms and next day I knew I had to reteach.

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

I had done a nice activity homework to assess the students understanding by having them classify into push and pull, but I did not hand it to the students because they did not really understand. After my class finished, I spoke with my cooperating teacher and asked her a few questions to assess myself: what went wrong? Why did my students did not understand and how would’ve she explained push and pull factors? She told me she has explained it as I did. She did suggest that for the next day I should have the items already classified on the board at first and have the students write that. The next morning I took her advice and pasted all the items already classified into their corresponding immigration factor. I retaught the concepts and went item by item and discussed it.

The hardest concept was pull factor, but while teaching I decided to use my student’s own experience to teach. I asked a few students if they wanted to live anywhere else in the world. Some said they wanted to go to Disney. Then I asked them why. I used their own answers to explain pull factors, such as “she wants to live in Disney because of entertainment” and that helped the learning process a whole lot! Then I had the whole class wanting to participate and mention where they wanted to live and why. I experienced that bringing the student’s prior knowledge to explain a new concept is one of the greatest way for them to assimilate and learn a concept. I am also going to continue the morning messages and I have a few ideas to keep doing it and put a twist to it so my students don’t get bored.