First day of the second semester

Last Thursday I had my first day of practice this semester. I know I should write, this entry about my experience with microteaching this semester but we started with conducting the whole lessons, so at first I will tell you about microteaching from the last semester and then about one lesson that I conducted last Thursday. 

Microteaching is a good way of learning how to teach at the very beginning. However, I prefer conducting whole lessons because it is easier. While conducting microteaching we need to fit into the teacher's plan and we have less time to carry out the task. Also, on our practice, we often got the task that we needed to do with children, on a break, before the lesson. Because of that, we didn't have time to prepare it well. Although it taught us how to improvise which is very important in teachers' work. 

This semester we started our internship conducting the whole lessons. We received materials from our mentor teacher much earlier, so we had plenty of time to prepare. 
The lesson about which I would like to tell you was in grade 7, on a culture lesson and the topic was "America as a melting pot". We started the lesson with a brainstorm, we asked them what do they know about melting pot and we wrote their ideas on the board.  Then, children watched a short video about immigration in the USA, twice. While watching, they needed to answer the questions that they had on worksheets that we gave them. Then we checked the answers together and asked children additional questions.

It was the first lesson that we conducted in this class and because of that children were very shy and didn't want to speak, especially girls. Boys were more involved in a lesson. In the end, we asked them to talk to each other about the melting pot, because we thought that it would be much easier for them to talk with peers than with us but it also didn't work well. They knew that we would hear everything and also were scared to speak.
After the lesson, we talked about this problem with our mentor teacher. She told us that at the beginning of her work she also had that problem with this class but after some time children stopped to be ashamed and now they work with her normally. So we have to be patient and also give them some time to get used to us ......