Week 13_October 25th

Topic: Days of the Week and Numbers from 11-20

Teachers: Gisselt, Cristela and Mónica

Vocabulary: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Numbers from 11-20

Grammar: What day is today? What is your favorite day?

As part of the Review: The numbers, the alphabet (How do you spell Sunday?), the colors (red, blue, yellow, green, pink, orange, brown, white, black), prepositions (Monday is between Sunday and Tuesday).

Lesson Plan:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Second_Lesson_Cris,_monik,_Gisselt..pdf

Arrangement of the Classroom:

Monik's (Stage: Warm Up and Presentation)

Gisselt's (Stage: Practice [Part I])

Cristela's (Stage: Practice [Part II])

Warm-Up and Presentation:

First, I started with the "How are you today?" song with a different dynamic: 

There were three vertical stripes pasted on windows side. Ss were in line and followed me. Let's see the following video:

Although this performing activity could work a third time, I stopped in here because I just had 5 minutes for this activity. I had to perform a warm-up activity whose purpose was reviewing vocabulary from the previous classes: Family members, numbers, colors, and spelling. 

Every one had the opportunity to participate. That was great!!!

After this, I continued with the presentation of the topic: "Days of the week". I took Ss to the other part of the stage where the weekly planner was.

I started presenting the numbers from 11-17 whose purpose was just they had a little knowledge, thereby they had the chance to call them at the time we were completing the chart. Later they would have the opportunity to reforce them with more practice.

 Once they have recognized how to call the numbers whereby they had to call them and I discovered each day of the week in order to be pasted in the correct position of the week. I was focused on the pronunciation of the first letter of the days not in all of them.

Then, I said the days of the weeks with rythm by singing a song: 

"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, What day is today? What day is today? Friday, Friday."

Class Observation and My Case of Study:

I could observed that Nicole could participate in the warm-up stage because there was one opportunity for each of the class; by the contrary, she did not participate in the participatory task because she is not willing as the rest of her classmates are.
It is true that Children learn by their own experiences, as Piagets claimed, however, Vygotsky claimed that children learn by the influence of their environment. To create a suitable environment is needed to analyze the implication of the cognitive process in education (schooling).
It was difficult to start with this lesson because the construction of an attuned context depends on prior knowledge of the students. In this specific clase, there was not any prior knowledge about days of the weeks; there was not any representation (picture-cued) to teach them. On the other hand, there was just a prior knowledge about the alphabet. As Vygostky suggested, teachers need to create a social base (scaffolding) in order to help to the cognitive development. For this reason, what I did was to construct an internal representation of external reality when I tried to connect days of the week with the sounds and thereby this finally worked because students could socialize sounds with the fisrt letter of the words.
I could observe this effect in Nicole, she produced the sounds as well as her classmates. 

Finally, I introduced the participation of Gisselt. 

Practice (Part I):

Gisselt started her presentation with a meningful task. She presented two uniques faces that got Ss involved in showing their feelings. Then, she continued by presenting the calendar.

As Vygotsky suggested, she used the calendar as sign of having interaction between the students and their physical world. Although they did not know the meaning of "calendar" exactly, they could associate the latin american word "calendar" by "calendario". This was certainly a physical object in which the days of the week appear. Students could take place within a social relation and thereby they produced this approach in the following activity.

She handed out seven cards and whereby they had to represent the days of the weeks. 

It was interesting to see how they were linked the color represented on the board with the color of the card that they had. Of course, it was not the way in which they had to do it, but I could see how they were looking for a key or cue to solve their problems. They are congnitively connected with the physical environment in which they are.

After this activity, they had to perform another task with the boxes.
Let's see how this worked:

Nicole had connected the sound, the word and the calendar at this moment. She could do the task. That was great!


Practice (Part II):

Finally, Cristela presented a missing word game by skiping some days of the week in order to have Ss complete the missing days of the week.

It was interesting to see how students were curious in knowing what was happening around them when they were asked to closed their eyes.

Finally, they had a great moment to play with clay in order to set the spelling of the words.

Although the time was not enough to finish this task they were so excited about doing it. They did not want to finish doing it!!!!!

Resources:

http://psych.colorado.edu/~colunga/P4684/piaget.pdf

http://blogs.maryville.edu/shausfather/vita/vygotsky/