Man oh man oh man. I don’t know who had more fun  during “Language Day” at Bay View Charter School: Me or the children I was teaching Arabic to. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse, brilliant, charming, and lovely children are when it comes to teaching them and how much they look up/idolize their teachers when they are gifted new information, especially a foreign language that is as alien to them as it gets.

The experience of teaching such a young age group, like the 4th and 5th graders I dealt with, changed my prior beliefs that I wanted to exclusively teach adults. I may have had a change of heart after seeing how excited and engaged they become when submerged in language. Seeing them strive to understand the content and participate so willingly got me excited because they were excited.

Most of the children were very extroverted and wanted desperately to give the answer to a question when asked or participate in an activity that required them to think about the content they just absorbed and apply it to a game I was teaching them. I noticed that even the quieter, more introverted children were listening and absorbing information, even if they did not feel as comfortable coming up to the board and writing or participating in activities. I know this because they would raise their hand and privately ask me a question about the Arabic language or something else relative to a lesson being taught and would start to come out of their shell and feel comfortable enough to speak up more and more and . . . . have fun. Moments like those made me feel really really good about where I am at in my life right now. I never not want to see that transformation occur in future L2 learners.
Aside from feeling incredibly touched by how wonderful and engaged the children were, a lot of what we’ve been reading and discussing in P&P was so applicable to the learning and lesson that took place at the school. My personal favorite attribute of teaching, awareness, could not have been more applicable to today than ever before: it was happening constantly and because it was, I was better able to maneuver and gauge the lessons based on the students.

I wish we could do this sort of activity every month!!!!!!

Although my group’s poster (which for the most part was bare and for totally legitimate reasons) was not discussed in class on Friday, there was definitely some take away that occurred from doing the activity and analyzing the form(s) we were asked to look at.

Interestingly enough, what I understood from the activity examples that could very well be applied to a real-life classroom setting a/o situation is that even if there appears to be one method of doing an activity, there is in fact a multiplicity of ways to implicate said activity in such a way that engages and counters how students may understand a task. For example, the RoundRobin (or was it RobinRound? no matter) activity option could be addressed and used in a variety of ways using virtually any topic that comes to mind.When my group members and I were comparing the same activity in our forms, they all had very different uses. On the one hand, it could be used to analyze poetry, on the other hand it could be used to help student’s think critically about themselves with regards to the context of a lesson, make real life comparisons, and discuss their answers with other group members a/o with the whole class.

As this semester goes on, I have yet to be disappointed with any of the lessons and different teaching tactics/strategies presented. Is anyone else equally as amazed as I am at how versatile and flexible the lessons are yet how engrossing the process of learning is? I find it all very clever and ingenious in some instances.

-Danna

Friday October the 9th was filled with a variety of pleasant activities that involved both visual and interactive entertainment.
Watching Professor Shaw demonstrate a Spanish lesson to the class using a variety of teaching techniques and methods in Spanish only was both entertaining and extremely informative. The lesson provided realistic scenarios that could very well be applied to real life teaching in future classrooms. I viewed the lessons as a sample of sorts of what to expect when it comes time to do our own language planning at Bay View Academy.
I was observing the lesson (because of my obvious broken foot, boo hoo) and though I wasn’t actively participating in the lesson, merely observing different teaching methods really put into perspective how a language class could in fact be like. It can be fun, informative, interactive, silly, and impactful in ways that future students might not even be fully aware of yet gain so much from. I especially liked how Professor Shaw implemented multiple kinds of activities using some the same materials only in different ways that challenge students to listen and comprehend yet also enjoy.
When the lesson was over and my Arabic partner and I got together to discuss an outline of how we’d like to implement what we just observed into our teaching curriculum, ideas started coming out of us naturally. So, in a sense I guess you could say that Professor Shaw’s examples acted as a sort of catalyst of what/how we could gauge our lesson plans for future students.
Do we want to use colors in our lesson plans/activities? Pictures? Physical objects? The possibilities are endless, really.

-Danna A.