Preparing a quick lesson plan

     Last week on our practice our mentor teacher made us a surprise. She came to us while we had a break and told us to prepare two hours of English lesson for grade 5. We had 45 minutes to prepare lessons and the only materials that we had were from the student's book.

     We started with vocabulary revision from the previous lesson, we gave children definitions and they needed to guess words. After revision, we played hangman with key vocabulary from the new text. Next children made exercises from the book connected with the reading and then we told them to write a short text message in the same way as it was in the book. While pupils were writing we were walking in the classroom, checking and helping kids with writing. They didn't have any problems with this task and they read their works in front of the whole group. After the break, we started a topic about giving advice. We explained how we should give advice and how a piece of good advice looks like. To practice giving advice we gave children different kinds of situations and we asked them what piece of advice would they give to people in these situations. They have a lot of funny ideas, for example when we asked them about advice for a friend that wants to buy a book but he hasn't got enough money, kids said that 'he can rob a bank'. Thanks to this exercise children practiced 'should' and 'shouldn't'.

     It wasn't that scary as we thought. The teacher that was observing us didn't have any objections when in comes to our teaching, the only thing that she told us was that we need to check several times whether the children have written everything and if they understand what do they need to do.

  I think that the situation like this teach us how the teacher's work looks like. Teachers also sometimes have to prepare a lesson quickly when, for example, they find out that they have a replacement or when it turns out that tasks that they prepared are not suitable for a group and they cannot conduct them.