Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Wreath of Good Deeds

It's Christmas time and I've decided to do a little exercise with my students. I prepared the Wreath of Good Deeds. My students have been extraordinary this year. I've had more problems with the teachers than with the students themselves. Of course, there are those times when they just don't give a damn but mostly they love attending my classes. I love audience participation and I realized that having students enact, speak up, laugh is always the best way to learn a language. Most of the teachers I work with don't care too much about my method of teaching and as an Assistant, I'm supposed to help them out and basically follow their methods. Two of the teachers I work with have the most outdated approach to teaching a language and one of them takes it really too far. They expect me to get the students to repeat the lesson (for 30 mins) and make sure they've learnt it by heart! I do every activity in the book but repetition :) Oh, except I had to make them repeat my name 10 times since it's really long and they keep forgetting it or they call me Madam which again, I refuse to accept since I like to be part of the "in-crowd". 
The Wreath of Good Deeds is a competition that gets them to show off their writing skills. I prepared the wreath myself (Yes, I know. Thank You). Each time they do a good deed, they come with a witness and collect a leaf. On the leaf, they should write in perfect grammar about the deed. They should also mention their name and their class so that I can keep a tab of how many deeds each of them has done. For every good deed they get a sweet! On December 15, we total up the deeds and the person with the most number of good deeds takes home the Wreath. On the wreath, there are 5 postcards from 5 corners of the world and a few words from an inhabitant of that place! So they have new penpals :) So far it's working well and they seem to enjoy it. I even got some of the teachers to participate since it would motivate the kids a little more when they have to compete against the higher authority :D
End of Day 1

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