Jordan Declerico

When I was teaching ESL in Thailand most lessons would start out the same. I would usually like to do a little game that recapped the lesson before. Usually it would be something like throwing a ball around the room or some kind of dance elimination game. I liked trying to incorporate movement with learning as I have read this can be beneficial. We would then go into the lesson for the day where we would focus on specific sounds and vocabulary. Then I would present an activity and assist the students in the activity or speak with those who wished to further their conversational skills. Now that I have studied teaching further my methods are a bit more refined. I would still start every class with some sort of introduction or game if possible. After this, I would breifly and broadly introduce the topic/content for the day. Once the learner has an understanding of the broad topic that will be covered, I would outline the success criteria for the lesson. The success criteria are all the things that I hope to accomplish by the end of the lesson. They are usually 2 things that are imperative, and 1-2 things that would be additionally beneficial if we mastered the basics. For example; If the theme of the day was poetry and the lesson was on incorporating personification in a poem, my success criteria would be
1) Identify examples of personification in other poems.
2) Indicate how you knew it was personification
3) Incorporate personification in a short poem of your own (4-6) lines
4) (Bonus) Reflect on the emotions you may have felt when reading the poems. What does personification do to the reader when they experience it?