12/29 Word puzzle

It's my turn to teach on stage again! Whenever I have to teach, I feel excited but also nervous because teaching on stage is the only way to examine if my activity can be put into practice or not. But I also feel nervous because I don't know if students can understand me in class. This time, I decided to change my way of teaching vocabulary. Instead of lecturing or asking students to write on what they had previewed on the blackboard, I designed a word puzzle with all new vocabulary of this unit inside. I passed the word puzzle in different timing in three classes and I found it's a good way to examine if students did their preview before class. However, I also realized some students had difficulties answering EVERY question in the word puzzle. Though it reflected that these students didn't preview or weren't concentrated enough in class, I found it may be meaningless or a waste of time for them because they didn't have the chance to do self-examination on their preview since it's the goal of this activity. Therefore, I couldn't help but wonder: how can I make my activity reach its goal in class? But I'm still searching for some efficient solutions.

1/7 Last day of lecture (5 ways to reuse paper + recycled paper + Magic Book)

After the class I found that how I use to open a class seems to decide the atmosphere of the rest of that class. For example, in class Lien, since it's the first class and I know more about them, when I realized that the students were sleepy right after entering the classroom. I told them something that had happened to me the night before instead of teaching in the beginning of the class. But I did tell them that for some purposes. During the description, I used the sentence pattern such as, "be willing to…", "Chances are that…", "consist of" and "pick up the phone" in order to remind them the important phrases learned the day before. Due to the small talk in the first 5 minutes, students seemed to wake up and get ready for class. Therefore, I kept doing the 2nd activity-ways to reuse the paper. I divided them into six groups according to their seat randomly. The reason I didn't ask them to go into the assigned group was that since it's the end of this semester, I don't think students would have time or energy to take care of another big project. The activity is small, designed to invoke their imagination and creativity and see if they can express some important points to the audience clearly in a short time. In class Lien, students are creative and always come up with excellent ideas as long as they are "awake." Their ways of reuse paper including making paper planes, expressing anger, even making the masks of Phantom. When I showed them the "recycled paper" Yu-ming made, they were so excited and tried to teach me the proper procedures of making a "normal and beautiful" recycled paper. But in the other two classes, due to the limit of time, I had to start the teaching right after going into the classroom. Therefore, students' reaction was not as good as that in our class. Also, according to my observation, students in 廉班 finish Magic Book in a short time, while students in 捷班 needed more time to finish their Magic Book. And also, I should have spared more time to solve the problems students in 捷班 may have when they write the Magic Book.