Friday, October 3rd, 2017.

This day we had dour closing ceremony. We went to Colegio Don Bosco as usual and we enjoyed playing some games with our student. We eat pizza and cake. It was a nice experience working with kids I learned a lot from them.

I hope I can have another opportunity like this again!

Friday, October 20th, 2017.

This day we had the great opportunity of meeting an English Fellow from The US Embassy. I think it was a nice experience because the teaching career hardly ever has these kind of opportunities! Kati Casto presented how we can improve our classes, and she gave some tips too.

1) Be excited about your class content: I think this one is one of the keys to have a succesful class!
You should look happy, enthusiastic about your topic even if you do not like the topic. This is in order to project you excitement to your students and to show them that English is not boring.

2) Create a Lesson Plan that works for you. You cannot have different activities in your lesson if you do not know your students. First, you have to get to know your students, their learning style, if they are hyperactive or not. Getting to know your students should give you some ideas in how to organize your lesson.

3) Command and Respect from your students. It is important to cross a line or a limit between the teacher and the students. If you start joking with them or talking about your personal problems, this can be a problem. Sometimes students get advantage of it! They will believe that the teacher is their friend and this can lead to a disrespectful path.

4) Give students different opportunities or responsabilities. If you have the same wrap up everyday one day you can have one of your students to do it. They will not do it as you! but that does not mean that is not okay. We should start giving opportunities to our students because they are capable of great things if we give them the chance

5) Incorporate VAK type of learner in your class. Not everybody has the same learning style. For example, I am a visual learner, I get bored if I do not see something colorful in the classroom. There are some others who are kinesthetic or auditory. You should take into account this! In this way, all of your students will enjoy the class.

6) Plan questions based on knowledge goal. Ask questions after you have explained the topic. Or let the students do it. Give them some time and confidence to do it. 

7)Evaluate Using rubrics. Rubrics are really important because students have some ideas in how to do the assignment. They can see what is going to be checked. It is really important that you show them the rubric before the assignment, during the assignment and after too.

8)Collect and use data. You can create a little quiz after the topic was explained. As a teacher you will see which topics are not clear for your students. You can improve the way you teach.

9)Take time to reflect. Take some time to review what you have been doing during the semester. What am I doing wrong? What am I missing? 

10) Encourage and Grow. Learn from your students and let them to learn too! You will not make the same mistakes that you did some years ago. We teach how to learn, but sometimes we can make mistakes and that is fine.

Friday, October 13th, 2017.


This day the more challenging skills were taught: Listening and Reading. Why do I believe that these are the more challenging ones? Well, why would kids be interested in listening or reading something? Not even adults find them interesting. I do not why, probably it's our culture or I do not know but in my opinion these skills are really important.

Listening is important because as ESL learners we should achieve a great pronunciation and if we listen properly we will achieve this objective.

Reading, on the other hand, can provide you with a great vocabulary. While you are reading an English book you will find new words, idioms, expressions that  are only used in countries with English as a mother tongue.


But well, I think my classmates did a great job with these skills. One group have some technical issues and our teacher advised us to always have a back up plan. If your audio does not work, you can always use your voice! Sometimes we will have to improvise.
Kids looked happy and they enjoyed the class and so did I! I took some pictures of the kids' drawings. They were beautiful. In this activities you can see how creative children can be!
It was a great Friday unfortunately the classes have ended! I will miss my tiny humans. 
This coming friday we have a conference with a fellow. I'm excited. This will be the first full English conference. Awesome!

Friday, October 6th, 2017.

Yeap, we taught twice :-( but this time it was easier! we had vocabulary as skill. The topic was Professions! We prepared a lot of visual material. It is not because we have a lot of money but kids enjoy colorful and creative things. So that's why we created a lot of material. I believe that in the case of teaching vocabulary to children this is necessary because it catches their attention. 

Well, we found a way to keep children's attention. We created a "Behavior List" we put happy faces or sad faces if they were behaving bad, and none of them did! So I think we did a great job with this list. It was a great idea. 

We received a great feedback and congratulations from our teacher and from our classmates.
if you ask me, I enjoyed this class more than the previous one(reading) and probably it was because I felt more confident with my kids!

It was a greaaaaat day! But this coming friday we are only going to observe, no more classes.

The other group taught Grammar! it was a really challenging skill, kids do not pay attention to this. 
I mean, it is sad because grammar is so interesting, but they find it boring. So probably we need to find newest and more creative ideas to teach this skill.

Here you have :) 

Friday, September 29th, 2017.

This was my teaching dayyy!! This meant a lot to me and to my group as well. As I said some weeks ago we were going to teach READING :( we were nervous, but actually this went even better that we expected. Kids loved the material! they were a little bit hyperactive but well they are kids. It is normal. We receive feedback and advice from our teacher. I really enjoyed this experience. Even though, reading is not my thing.. I mean I like it but teaching reading to children is a great challenge!

Friday, September 22nd 2017.

This day we started classes with Children! I was nervous and I was not going to present that day but one of my friends yes.

This day vocabulary and grammar were taught. The vocabulary class was really nice, kids looked very focus on the class.
At the end of this day, Teacher Orlando gave feedback about the class and we as observers gave some ideas about the class. Things that could have been better and stuff like that!

Here you have.

Friday, September 15th 2017.

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This day was free due to Independence Day.

Friday, September 8th 2017.


This day we received our Polo Shirts it was amazing! I was so excited because I really love the color.
After we received it, we spent the afternoon creating our lesson plannings, as I say before my group is in charge of teaching reading on Friday 29th. I am really nervous but I hope everything will be fine.

This day I didn't take a lot of photos, but I will show you the shirt and one photo of the class.

Friday September 1st 

 This day I was soo excited because I thought we would receive our polo shirts but we didn't :-( I hope this coming friday we receive them. However, it was a great day because our teacher assigned the classes we will teach at Colegio Don Bosco. Me and my group will teach on September 29th.
I do not what to think, I am nervous because we are going to teach to 1st grade probably. It would be a completely new experience I have never taught before, well in my social service in public schools ,but I think this time it will be different. Anyways, we discussed some ideas about how to teach the topic "Animals", and we will teach Reading. Difficult huh? They are kids and even for grown people reading is boring, so I think we have a challenge! In my case I love reading, so I will try to do everything that I can to project my joy through reading. Wish me luck!

Pictures of today.

Friday August 25th 2017

This day was really interesting because we were invited to an event, our teacher was there with two teachers more, one was teacher Yanira who was my teacher previous years and the other one is a French teacher who I have not met yet. The guys from Asociacion Salesiana de Estudiantes de Idiomas (ASEID) were asking about the teaching process. We heard advice and some of the experiences that they have had. In my opinion it is phenomenal that they organize this type of events. Why? because we interact with experienced people, they give us ideas about how to teach children, teenagers and adults. Teacher Yanira mentioned something important "Teachers are not psychologists" we cannot say that a child is hyperactive" maybe we will have children with a lot of energy, but we can find a way to use that energy in something good.

I believe that ASEID did a great job with this event, they should organize more :-).

Here are some pictures, we were at Magna B.
You will see Teacher Orlando, Teacher Yanira and Veronica.

Friday August 18th 2017

This day my classmates and my group presented different kind of classes, some of them taught vocabulary, others grammar, listening and so on. In the case of my group, we taught a Grammar class. It was about Present Perfect Tense, I was in charge of the explanation I hope everything was clear. The teacher Orlando will give feedback about what he saw during the presentations, I hope advice from him. I cannot wait to see how is to teach in real life and with the little ones (children).

I share with you some of the pictures that I took that day.

Friday August 11th.

This was the first day after vacation, teacher Orlando explained what we would do and we started working. The class was about planning a lesson and we are going to teach it this coming friday. He assigned topics to different groups. I am going to teach grammar, present perfect to be precised. Grammar is taught using a PPP(Presentation, Practice, Production) lesson, so with my group decided activities and the grammar explanation. In my case, I love grammar so I do not think it will be a problem to explain this topic. This coming friday we are going to play and have fun but we are going to learn too. 

You will see some of my classmates taking pictures for their blogs :).

Friday July 28th.

This day we studied some topics about how to teach different English skills, in my opinion that is great because we do not remember everything we studied the last semester in the theoretical subject. My classmates showed different ideas and how we as future teachers can improve the way we teach.
In the case of  my group we explained "How to teach Listening" I think listening is the main skill because if you do not understand what your teacher says or the audios, you will not be able to catch the idea. Imagine if you do not understand what the audio says, and the evaluation is to write what is the audio about? If you want to speak well, you should learn how to listen in a good way. This day I learned and remembered a lot of things. It was extremely useful.

Hello there! My name is Pamela Manzano, I'm 19 years old. I'm studying my third year of Languages Major focused on teaching English at Don Bosco University. When I was in high school I thought that English was not my thing because I'm quite impatient but when is about teaching I try to do my best. I like sharing my knowledge with other people, and I'm always trying to improve and study not only at the university but at home as well. I hope you enjoy my blog.

The first day of classes was July 27th 2017. We met our new teacher Orlando Gómez, at the beginning he talked about what is the subject about and the evaluation system. As he said, when you are a teacher you do not have to be afraid of talking in front of a lot of people. You have show confidence even if you are dying inside. This day we did some role plays with the objective of acting confident in front of people. My group did a role play about a movie called "White Chicks" it was really funny. If you have not watched this movie, you should. After, we recreated a sad story about the Titanic. This day was great. We were doing funny things but learning too. In the pictures that I will upload you will see a role play of my classmates, it was about THE WALKING DEAD