NINTH CLASS REPORT

I arrived in the school at about 10:00 o’clock and I went to the teacher’s room where I saw a teacher who teaches there before me and I asked him since he had already taught there if I could teach there earlier. He told there were few students and I should hurry up because they were leaving. I went to the classroom straight away. However, when I entered the room, there was nobody, so I decided to go after them around the school when I found a student who had been in the class just in the first day for he considered himself already passed the year. I asked him to come into the class and I asked about the others; he told me he would go to the class and he went to call one of his classmate who was somewhere in the school. I went to the classroom in order to wait for them to come in.

I started to clean the board and prepare the materials that I was about to use. When they came in, they sat in front of me and I began to call the roll. I greeted them and I started to show some of the compound forms on the board eliciting them to understand their meaning. Then I explained about the game we were to play. With the ideas of the Content-based instruction approach in mind, I wrote the name of the game "Guess who is the famous" on the board and elicited them to understand the name. I asked who wanted to be the first to come to the front of the class with his back against the board. A student volunteered himself and I explained the game's dynamic by telling that since there were just two students in the class they would have five chances to guess who the famous is and that if they get it right at the first clue sentence, they would win five candies, and at each miss attempt, they would lose a candy, so if they guess it right just in the last chance they would win just a candy and if they miss all the chances they would win no candy.

When they saw the candies in the box, their eyes seemed to shine as they acted really ardently to play the game. Then, longing for playful purposes with contextualization and constructivist principles, I started the game by writing the name of a famous on the board where just the other student could see it and I gave to the first volunteered student a paper with the sentence written with the compound forms of the indefinite pronouns describing attributes of the celebrities. I read the sentence and then I asked him to read it and with no translation he should guess who it was. Since this first student rarely came to classes, he had some difficulties at guessing it at first for he knew just three or four words of the sentence, but I kept helping him by giving clues just in English until he finally got it right at the third time, so he won just two candies at this first round. The second student is the one that is talented with English and he got it at the first chance and he won five candies. We kept playing rounding the two of them until the candies finished and I had to create another sentence clue since all the ones I had done were already used. The talented student got many candies for he was really able to interpret the sentences giving the answers right away.

They adored this game, but I do not know if it was for the cognitive purposes or because of the candies. This game was really motivating since they truly made huge efforts to improve their cognitive English schema which I could notice they started to recall every English word they had inside their minds. Since this warm-up took too much time, I hurried to start with the song I had planned. When I wrote the song’s name on the board, the talented student became so happy for he said he already knew that and that he loved that song so much. I answered: cool! Then I got it right! Thus, I elicited them to understand the song meaning "Somewhere I belong", I helped them to pronounce it and I asked what are the words they think they may find in the song. He told me it is probably about a guy who is constantly searching for a place where he can feel better, where he finds a sense of belonging. I was really amazed for he already knew the song idea.

The other student told us that he did not like Rock and Roll songs, when the talented one who adores this genre, teasingly started to call his classmate a fag because he just enjoyed pagode ones. I displayed the song vocabulary on the board eliciting them to understand the meaning, then I handed the lyrics out and played the song as they started to fill it. Since they were not sure if it was OK, I had to play it four times until they felt secure about it. I invited them to sing it, just me and the one who likes that genre sang the song. In the end of the class, I asked about the compound forms and the song main idea, they showed they were really fast learners as they answered me properly. I advised them to study those indefinite pronouns and its compounds forms for the exam. For homework, I asked them to answer questions 1 to 4 to page number 130. This class was great as well, even if I had used the traditional behaviorism model for I have motivated all the students to participate with external reward strategies, but it worked anyway, even if apparently the real purpose of learning seemed as secondary goal.