Special Lesson at School

Hey guys, we recently had "Special Lesson" week at our school, in which all the teachers were free to make up their own lessons and teach it in however manner they wanted to. My approach on the lesson was finding your own motivation and exposing it; particularly in English. In the lesson, I tried to touch on a couple things:

1. Basic differences between a "professionally written" article and an article written to a friend or family member. For example, the usage/lack of punctuations, full sentences, smiley faces, etc. when writing each one.

2. I also wanted the students to put their own thoughts and emotions at that time on to paper then hear themselves read it aloud to their partners. It may be easier at times to express yourself, particularly a random topic like "What's your motivation?", on paper than in words. So this exercise was targeted towards taking advantage of the diversity of English and expressing your true feelings through physical words and body language.

3. Carrying on a conversation, regardless of the personality of the person you're talking to. In this part, with the motivation topic in mind, I had the students work in timed intervals. One person said one thing they thought motivated them in one sentence. The other person had 3 minutes to ask as many questions about that reason (imagining the other person is extremely reserved). Then I switched partners and expanded it to 5-7 minute interval in which the students shared their own ideas reciprocally like a natural conversation. Then finally I had each person state their motivation in front of the group, to not only help with a public speaking voice, but to bring the conversation to a more group-like scenario.

4. And Most importantly, finding your own motivation. Sounds lame, but since it's my class and I had a free lesson, I figured why not be as lame as you can get and do a topic like motivation : ] .


It turned out to be really enjoyable, and hopefully the students enjoyed it as much as I did. For whatever time I have left here, I just want to help the students as much as possible. Let's face it, they see me once a week for an hour, then they're alone the rest of the week. It's obviously up to them how much they will progress in their studies, or life for that matter, but if I can say or do something that will spark their desire to take their minds to the next level, then that's what I'll aim for....