An Odd Tinge of Envy

Double
Photo by Iddo Epstein

I believe I can safely say that sharing educational materials I prepare is something I do easily and gladly. Not only are materials up on this blog, I share them on our local email group, on my class website and face to face.

For lesson number three with my class of 32 struggling adult learners trying to pass a high-stakes reading comprehension exam, I prepared “Short Films for Reading Comprehension – Take 3. This time the focus was on “main idea” type questions.

This course is given at the same hour in two groups. I’m fortunate to be teaching with a friendly teacher with whom communication is easy. We both swap materials before each lesson. So naturally I sent him the worksheet with the links.

My lesson on Tuesday went a bit slower than I had planned. These students are allowed to use an electronic dictionary on the final exam. It won’t be of much assistance if they don’t know how to use it. Each lesson I highlight something students need to know in order to find the correct meaning. This lesson’s focus was on parts of speech, mainly nouns and verbs, but some adjectivs too. I particularly like starting with the word “play”. Almost all students know the meaning of the word “play” as a verb but most of them think the meaning of the noun is “game”.  Here is the worksheet I prepared:

Parts of Speech_Keys

It turned out that many students had trouble telling the difference between a noun and a verb in L1. We spent more time on the worksheet then I had expected.

Since the students needed their group-work time on the article planned for today, I postponed the “video part” to next week’s lesson. I feel that was the correct decision, I can’t overload with frontal work.

Meanwhile, the other teacher DID have time for it!

While it was very rewarding to hear from him that the students really enjoyed it and he would like some more, I admit to feeling a bit jealous.

I wanted to try it FIRST!

 

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