For my third hour of teaching and onwards I was reassigned to ESAL 0370 an intermediate reading class. My third hour of teaching consisted primarily of vocabulary review. I planned two distinct activities for the class to review both recent and past vocabulary. The first activity that I planned and led the students in was a Kahoot consisting of vocabulary words from the student’s new and old readings. The Kahoot provided students with definitions of vocabulary words and tasked them with selecting the correct word. The Kahoot activity was the first activity of the class and took roughly 25 minutes from the start of class to the end of the Kahoot. Following the Kahoot, students were handed a worksheet with two activities for them to complete. Of these two activities one was partially designed by myself and the other was designed by my sponsor teacher. The activity that I partially designed was a matching activity tasking students with connecting vocabulary terms with their definitions. This activity focused primarily on their recently learned vocabulary. Upon the student’s completion of the activity, I tasked students with writing an answer on the board. Once all answers were written on the board I led the students in going over the answers. Overall this activity took ten minutes from the start to the end of going over the answers although it would have been much shorter if my sponsor teacher hadn’t told me to have the students write the answers on the board and then go over them. Following this, the students were assigned pages in their textbooks to work on in groups. When all students had finished their assigned pages I again led the class in going over their answers. Overall I feel like I learned many important things throughout this class. I specifically remember how shocked I was at how quickly the class completed the assigned matching activity and how relieved I was to have my sponsor teacher there to help me make the activity longer well still being a worthwhile experience for the students. Despite this, I feel that the most important thing I took away from this class in particular was the importance of and the difficulty of balancing activities for a class with ranging skill levels. Regardless of the students all being in the same class I distinctly felt at times that some of the students found the activities I planned to be too easy while at the same time, others were struggling with them.
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