new projects, new interests

From ENglish with Action Research, I want to move on to teaching Religious and moral education.
This subject is difficult to teach but with the Diploma in Religious Education course that I am attending, I am getting ideas on how to reach out to young people. I will be putting up thoughts on my modules and lessons learnt.
I hope to find out more about myself and to even start a blog conversation with my pupils.

teaching vocabulary

Now, I am teaching vocabulary to help Patricians score better. I am sourcing for all kinds of vocabulary related to what they need - colours, words for feelings, words for moods, words for walking etc to help them. Next is the issue of how to make them remember the words and how to use it in the right context. I tried this out with 5N2, the kids seem to enjoy writing a paragraph with the words. This was done in groups, each pupil had to write a sentence with a new word, and the next student continues the story with his new word. I am waiting to see if they remember the words they had to use.
Overall, I enjoyed this lesson too. Hope it is useful for the students.

The results !

I am glad that pupils are posting comments about what they have learnt. It is indeed surprising to learn that many of you have not been taught this. Could it be because you were not paying attention in class while the teacher was teaching? Could it also be because the teacher did not explicitly use these vocabulary like contextual clues?
Anyway the results are startling to say the least. Pupils have not improved much in their performance because of several things. Patricians do not take classwork seriously preferring to fool around until the examination proper. In addition, because they do not read voraciously, their vocabulary is limited - just refer to the comments and you will understand. Guys don't feel upset here - I am just analysing the problem. Finally, I have also noticed a propensity to not think. In summary, the pupils do not read the question carefully, nor do they extract the points, nor do they summarize the details. So in addition to teaching these package of skills, we must also teach vocabulary and make it part of their everyday language as well as force ( can we?) pupils to explain answers fully. Comments please.

New entries

WEll, after a haitus I am back. Life is fast paced now with so many things going on at the same time. I really have to multi-task. I have asked some students to post comments on my blog about this package so I can gather some more feedback. I am glad so far that most comments are positive and glad also that Shaun and others have posted really important pointers for what they would like to see more of in their lessons. This blog might become an important feedback tool for many teachers.
I see Jerel Lai has posted some more comments on my blog but he has gone MIA. Jerel, pls come back to class. Don't get stressed that the Os are round the corner. You'll make it no fears. Just come back!.
I will be posting comments on this action research once I can get all the results processed but we are almost there. In the meantime, keep posting comments.

discoveries from teaching contextual clues

When I taught the students contextual clues I discovered a new problem faced by them. The problem was one of wide vocabulary to rephrase the new vocabulary learnt. I had given them three worksheets to practise contextual clues. The powerpoint slides were simple enough. The worksheets which I took from the Macmillian English Dictionary workbook was a little tough. They gave nice new vocabulary to our Patricians who devoured them. However, they had problems generating new possibilities - how do you replace words like ubiquitous in a sentence ? Somehow the replacement lacked the finess that the original word had. Another problem was that they found it hard to define the word class or what is more commonly known as the parts of speech for that particular word learnt. So I had to re-teach ( or teach?) what is a noun, verb, adjective and adverb. All in, we learnt a lot both they and I.

contextual clues

This morning blogspot was very slow. I typed in twice before but could not publish and I lost everything. Here I am re-typing everything but somehow the words won't be the same because I am tired.

what is contextual clues?

I must say at the outset that I have 3 English classes which is great as it affords me opportunity for experimentation. The lesson which followed from inference was contextual clue enabling students to guess meanings of words from understanding the context of the passage. I prepared a powerpoint presentation on what was context, how words meant different things in different contexts and did about 5 slides where students had to apply what was taught.
Next they were grouped in fours to do a worksheet on contextual clues. They had to come up with word class, what the word does, clues available and finally the meaning of unfamiliar words.
It was amazing that a student, Roderick , was so absorbed with the lesson that he forgot his ticks and fidgety behaviour. I was surprised and happy to have an attentive Roderick. He was happy that the lesson was useful to him. I commended him on his behaviour and he beamed. On Monday, Roderick will go through the lesson with the class because he has mastered the skill of understanding contextual clues.
Isn't that wonderful?