When things go wrong in class

Teaching children is something really amazing, but sometimes it turns a little bit challenging. Why challenging? As we know, teachers have to plan every thing that they want to carry out to maintain order in the classroom, but sometimes that is difficult. Children are children; they will not always be peaceful and work quietly. They like to be in constant motion doing different things.

The attention span of kids is very limited. I think that at the very beginning of mi teaching practicum, that was a problem; there was an internal disturbance. Kids didn't want to pay attention to what I was teaching them. They wanted to play or to run all the time, so I had to do something. What I did is to ask them to sing a song called "The barn owl"  for them being quiet. Once we finished singing, they were quiet and paying attention. I told them that we had to sing that song every time someone was talking, not paying attention, making noise or doing something improper. That really worked because they liked to sing the song; it solved the problem every time it happened. Also, once there was an external disturbance. Kids from the other classroom were running and screaming in front of our classroom while they were in their break. That made my children not to pay attention and wanted to go out to play with them. What I did in that case was close the door. Later I talked with the teacher responsible of that section about the problem, and she told me that she will tell them not to go to play in front of our classroom.

Another problem that I faced was that an activity didn't work in the way it had to. The activity was about the colors, I was showing them some flashcards with the colors we were studying but they got bored quickly. Therefore, I decided to use my plan "B", another activity. That activity was carried out in the playground. I took them there because I had planned to do "the colors rally". They really enjoyed that activity, and the best part was that they learned, by playing, all the colors easily. As you can see, I had to change my plan, but it worked.

Talking about the chapter 8 of the book "Teaching English to Children", I consider that I took into account some tips that it presents for planning my lessons and, as I mentioned before,  for solving problems. I planned every single lesson carefully trying to include what was better for my kids to get fun and to learn at the same time . I was very careful about the activities I wanted to carry out to improve children' skills and about the time because I just had one hour in each day to cover all what I planned ; I went two days per week  I considered to use different games, songs, worksheets, and other materials. Kids really enjoyed to do different things every class. Planning my lessons in advance was essential because I had time to look for different things and to make some teaching material in order to get better results during the children learning process.

"When things go wrong, don't go with them."