Thurs Feb 18

We did the freewriting differently today - I brought different types of music and they had to write whatever came into their head as they heard it. I used the same music as last year, but this time we did them one by one. This worked better as, effectively, sts came in a bit late but were able to join in as we went. It did take a long time though - about 25 minutes. Many sts came up with memories of friends, cousins, grandparents etc. as they heard the music. They enjoyed it a lot. I think it's useful to have them connect music to memory, thoughts etc., and I think it's a memorable way of using music.

As not everyone had done the homework (one exercise from the handouts of yesterday) I asked them to hand it in on Tuesday.

We did a quick review of gerunds and infinitives using the summary at the back of the book, then did another exercise from the handout. They seemed to get the hang of them more, but I still feel that they are very controlled exercises.

To break up the action between the review and going on to different types of Gs and Is, we did the song that we couldn't do yesterday: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the first time I've used this song although I've often thought about using it. I blanked out the words which contained Gs and Is although there aren't that many; and a couple of other content words. The song proved to be a bigger challenge than I'd expected. The lyrics are sung quite fast and not so clearly as other songs. Still, they got most of the words. The trickiest ones were "walking", "rob", and "to pay". They enjoyed talking about the song too and finding out about some of the references.

We went on to "Different types of Gs and Is" and this seemed to go well. We only had about 40 minutes to finish the class, so we only did one exercise to practise (which seemed to be enough this time, actually), and then in SGs they created a small poster on coloured paper of either "5 things to worry about if you're a CELE student" or "5 things to be happy about if you're a CELE student". This was done well (and just in time!). I had to remind them that with lists, we often start them with gerunds rather than with infinitives. So this was a good practice, at least, on choosing one over the other. There were very few mistakes on the final product. I had to take them down in the end as I was afraid they'd be removed by a cleaner, and wanted to save them for the next class to put up again.

The TTs noted a couple of new things. E didn't come today as she was sick.

C observed "checking learning"; V observed "the learner as doer", and M observed "grammar as content". I was surprised that the trainees didn't observe the final creative activity as "the learner doing" or a way of "checking learning". They didn't make the link between that activity and the previous learning.

M noticed that throughout the entire grammar presentation, I didn't write on the board, which is very different to the way he is used to presenting grammar.

I get the feeling the trainees are at a "tired" stage of the semester as I would have expected more observations than this by now. Should I be pushing them a little more??