This week I'm feeling overwhelmed with the amount of English corners I have to teach. What gets me by is knowing that I'll have some great new additions to my Resource Notebook. Every week I'm going to post the topics and then expand on a few of them as the week goes by in order to give you more insight on how to make these subjects work in your classroom.
Just for reference, these classes are geared towards an age group of 17+ since I have many high school and college students plus working adults.
Tuesday 7-8pm: Comparisons
This was a last minute class that was put on me as I walked through the door today so I didn't get as much brainstorming time as I'd like. However, I was teaching a class where we were comparing things like the city and the countryside, Beijing and Shanghai, plus day and night. I started realizing how many ways there were to compare things to each other so tonight I'm going to try and teach more ways to do that. Since this will be a mixed group, I'm going to give the more advanced students more challenges. I wish I had more preparation time though!
Wednesday 7-8pm: Short Term vs Long Term Effects
Lately I'm finding it more difficult to teach classes to the higher level students as their expectations are higher. However, I have learned that the majority of the students in the training center struggle with cause and effect language. I've already decided that some of the topics for this class are things like deciding to have a family, certain work policies, and maybe even some science fiction type scenarios.
Thursday: 7-8pm: The French Side of English
This one is quite self explanatory as far as content but it's actually a bit difficult to think about how to incorporate it into a lesson that gets people talking rather than just teaching. I have quite a bit of experience with French so I'll also be able to talk about my own learning experiences with the language and what helped me. I have much more time tomorrow to flesh out what I'm going to do for this class.
Friday 2-3pm: Oops! I forgot!
There are two things I've been incorporating into my classes lately: role play and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Last week I did a role play class where we recreated the meeting of Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak that went over well. Chinese students have a difficult time warming up to role plays as it goes against their natural inhibitions but hopefully they'll be able to build more trust in me as time goes on. This week I'm going to try and recreate Holly remembering her meeting at Sing Sing. What's so gruesome about that?
Saturday 2-3pm: Getting Around.
Sometimes I absolutely love doing straight forward vocabulary classes. I'm thinking of opening up with things like tuk-tuk, cruise ship, limousine and etc. Then I'm going to do a gap fill storytelling activity where hopefully they'll be able to use the language in a story of their own. I always try to create new connections to the material to help them solidify their new knowledge.
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