Making Progress

Some of our Year 10 Students

 



On Wednesday we had all of our groups. We began the day in Mataespesa with our Year ten group. Today they were really productive. The work they are doing with us now will count towards their final grade and will be assessed by myself, Wendy and their English lit head Beverly Perez. We began by introducing them to a number of Aesop’s fables and asking them to pull out the morals in each tale and seeing if they could comprehend the reasons why certain animals were chosen to illustrate each moral. We created a sprawling list of animals together as a group and attributed human qualities to them all. Then we decided to assign them the task of creating their own fables involving animals. Writing their own fable shows them how to keep a story short and to the point, allows them to think logically and look for meaning behind what they write rather than just slop words onto a page because they have been told to do. Here the imaginations of the students shone through and we could see their interest growing as they began to associate the animals with the message they wanted to express. We will continue with fable writing with them on Monday.

With our year nine group we finally had the opportunity to take control of the class after observing them for so long. On previous observations we had discovered them to be quite a boisterous bunch and felt playing word games would be an ideal way to break the ice. They responded well to instruction and played well. After the game we asked them to write down everything they knew about Ireland like we had done with the previous groups and again we had some interesting answers. This group all started off by saying that the Irish love beer and shamrock shakes. We discovered that one of our students Jimmy (Jaime) had been to Dublin and he spoke for a few moments about his time staying in Ballsbridge.

With our Year eight group we played spelling and vocabulary games with many of them proving really clever and able to recognise words like Zephyr and Pneumonia. Although one student did confuse pneumonia with amnesia and announced that pneumonia is when you forget things to the whole class. We also handed out story evolution sheets to the group to gauge their level of understanding of how to structure the story. This proved a little difficult for this group with the majority in a panic over what to name their character more than anything else. Several could not finish the exercise but those that did flourished and came up with some really interesting and imaginative ideas.