First math lesson and first bad lesson.

     Recently on my practice, I conducted my first math lesson. I was scared of math because when I was in school, I always had a problem with that subject. 

    The lesson that I conducted was in grade 5 and children started to learn fractions. They already had some knowledge about that topic, so we decided to do some practice. We made 'fraction pizza project'. Children divided their pizzas into eight pieces, and they draw different ingredients on each slice. After that, they needed to describe their pizzas using fractions. It was a fun activity and children truly enjoyed it. It turned out that math lessons are not so scary and that they can be entertaining for children. Math does not have to be boring, and children do not need to do only boring exercises from the book. When they make activities like that, with the use of visuals, it is easier for them to understand math. 

     As you can see from the title of this post, besides the first math lesson I had also first bad lesson. It was an English lesson in grade 4. I gave children a picture story, and they needed to describe it in groups. First, we made a brainstorm of words that they could use to write this story, and here was my first mistake, because I focused only on adjectives and I did not give pupils any verbs. After that, I divided them into groups. Children needed to work with their colleagues that were sitting next to them. Here was my second mistake because I did not do this clearly and after that, they asked me questions about their groups. When they started describing pictures only one pupil in the group worked and others just sit and talked about something unrelated with a task. They spoke mainly in Polish, and I didn't know what to do. When they finished I asked them to read their stories in front of the whole group. They did that, but when one group was presenting their work, other pupils did not listen to their friends, even after my warning. 

     After that lesson, I talked with my mentor teacher and she gave me feedback. She is very helpful, she told me that each child in a group needs to have their own role, and that I should be more firm and when pupils will see once that they can do whatever they want they will do it always, so from the very beginning I need to show children who is in charge in a classroom. 

     This situation gave me the idea for the topic of my action research. I would like to improve my ability to organize group work and maintaining discipline during that kind of work. I cannot teach kids language when I do not know how to make them work in groups or pairs because it is crucial in learning English, especially when it comes to speaking skills.