Lesson Observation 4 (School Practice)

Today, I observed a GPTE 2nd grade student's CLIL lesson. The lesson was about chocolate and there had been a few lessons before. The teacher refreshed the students' memories with open-ended questions such as "Which chocolates did we talk about?" This was a good example of activating prior knowledge. Then, she triggered the students' curiosity with questions such as "Where is chocolate from?", "How old do you think chocolate is?". 

Before the video activity, she introduced the words that the students might have difficulty understanding. I think this was very appropriate in terms of preventing distraction during the video. While watching the video, the teacher kept the students' attention alive with short questions by stopping in between and observing whether they understood or not. The short trivia activity after the video ("Chocolate was discovered by who?", "Do you know who Mayans are?") reinforced the knowledge.

I think the most striking part of the lesson was that the teacher brought real chocolate seeds to the classroom.Thanks to this use of concrete materials, the students had not only a theoretical but also a sensory experience. Then, the teacher asked them to play a game where they bargained and sold these chocolate seeds to each other. Some students did not understand the game at first. However, at this point, the teacher asked the students who understood to explain the game. I liked this part very much because it provided peer learning and she did not spend time explaining over and over again. She walked around and checked the groups during the activity. The students were divided into small groups and bargained among themselves, which contributed to the development of both linguistic and social skills.