Lesson on Charity

 Reflection on Lesson on Charity

 charity_what to give and environment_ - Google Slides

My second lesson was to cheat Charity to Grade 4 students. It was a 45 minutes session that started at 8:30 am. From my last lesson setbacks related to technical issues, this time around I decided to download all the videos I intended to use to teach, and I uploaded them into my PowerPoint presentation. I also sent the materials to be printed a day before to my Mentor, so that they could be ready on time. And of course, I reached the school about 40 minutes before time to check some materials and equipment, and get set before the student started coming.

In spite of all the preparation, I couldn’t still play one of the 2 videos I downloaded onto my laptop, so I sent it to my Mentor through WhatsApp, and she downloaded it into her own laptop, and it could play on the projector. The first part was pre-teaching and I went straight into the lesson proper without any warm-up because we already wasted time opening the videos. After watching the videos together, I asked the students how they felt about it, what happened, and how they would describe the various characters, to elicit some vocabulary. The kids were amazing! They gave some keywords such as sharing, happiness, love, care, good, and help, and they could eventually guess the topic of the lesson: Charity. I was even more surprised when hoping to introduce a vocabulary that would be new to them “empathy”, they also knew the word. Later on, when a student asked about the meaning of refugee. I felt comforted that at least I had something new to teach. Their teacher, my Mentor, really did a great job and set a very good foundation for these kids as far as learning English as L2. So I just had to explain the difference between empathy and sympathy and add more vocabulary that I grouped inside a table

The next step was the KWL activity. My Mentor had not only printed the materials, but she also cut them for me! I asked the students to pair up and discuss their KWL. I guessed they had much to say because the class became a little bit noisy, and as it is common to see during group activities, they were discussing in L1. Here too, the kids impressed me with their questions:

-if charity supports hospitals

-How to start charity work?

-How many people it helps

-What is the biggest charity in the world

-How many people need charity

After the discussion, I was happy to see that I touched on most of their worries, and from the presentation of two slides about people suffering all over the world, they themselves could answer the question about how many people need charity: “many”, they said. However, I needed to research the biggest charity in the world because although I mentioned the UNO, I was not sure which specific organization is the biggest.

The kids were very interesting in their contributions, and I didn’t realize the time was over. However, I think the students are equipped enough to understand the reading part of it that I intend to handle during the next lesson. Time management in teaching has always been a challenge for me. I only look at the day’s goal, and I don’t check the time, even if I clearly specify the duration of the various stages. I always like to go deeper, give more examples, and allow one question to lead us to another and then to another, and more ideas come up that I feel are important to add to the explanation for better understanding, and I would find myself diverting completely from the lesson. For example, in my last lesson with Grade 7 on Food and Drink, I had 2 periods of 45 minutes each, and I couldn’t still finish. The technical fault was not the only cause, I also went added more information that came to my mind in the course of teaching, and that was not in my lesson. I was very happy when my Mentor gave me the chance to finish the lesson this day. If it were in a full-time class teacher context like the one I held in my country, I would have been capable of skipping a subject for the next day, just to make sure that I was completely done with the one at hand. But here, the next teacher is waiting, and I must stop. I really need to work on this.

To conclude, I would say all was fine, the students actively participated, the teachers were very supportive as usual, and technology didn’t disturb that much.