On Friday 13th of May, I arrived to SJKC Jinjang Tengah 2 to be greeted by the smiling faces of Mr Tiong and Puan Lim. Puan Lim is a local GB dedicated to serve the low income urban students at her school which are predominately Chinese. The venue was a multipurpose room on the first floor. The students and teachers were still slowly assembling when I arrived. I was requested on many occasions to grant permission for others to join, the request was never refused. In total there was 78 students and about 20 teachers participating in the micro teaching demo.
I played one round of Simon Says with students. We started with an intro toon. We introduced the classroom management technique of Give Me Five to the students. Throughout the day this technique was employed much to the teachers’ amazement. I made a spot assessment of the students writing ability; I determined it was was basic.We watched Nouns and Conjunction Junction. Then we went into the Simpsons Sentence Variety tutorial. After introducing FANBOYS, the students took out their USEKL gift notebooks.
In a game like setting, students determined which FANBOYS coordinating conjunction best joined the sentences projected on the screen. Students were shown a sentence, and they were given 2 minutes to right the corresponding FANBOYS in large print. I did the same. After a count of 3, we showed our answers. Students also wrote a couple of compound sentences and used CUPS as the marking criteria.
Judge Jody further reinforced sentence variety with a few cases. Some sentences were on the screen and the students had to determine whether the samples were complete sentences or fragments. A brief review of narrative writing skills for UPSR P2 SEC C was also rincluded. The students were behaved and well engaged throughout the session. Many the observing teachers assisted me in monitoring.
We briefly touched on some strategy for UPSR BI P2 Sec C. The main features of a narrative were reviewed with students. Before the students were dismissed, I assessed the students comprehension with some questions. The students were happy; moreover, they walked away with the enhanced ability to write compound sentences.
The afternoon session was with about 12 English teachers. We began the afternoon with English Mania as the lead in. The highlight of the pair discussion was how 25% of a student’s final evaluation depends upon their performance in English. It was significant realisation that the Chinese State Educational System had an intense emphasis on English. SKJC Jinjang T2 is a Chinese vernacular school and was impressed by the premium China puts on English. Another concept was that America was not pushing English on the world as much as the world is pulling it.
Again when I introduced Frog, I received a collective sigh. I had to call on Kermit to re-associate a pleasant image with Frog. I introduced the laundry list of SCORM packages available to them. I broke down the learning objectives of most English SCORM packages Years 4-6. During which time, I spotlighted the packages that were transferrable UPSR friendly. skills The group randomly selected Island of Legends which was UPSR BI P1 reading comprehension type activity. We cover 2 Learning Lessons with one assessment file. The next demo was of a phonics based SCORM file that awed the lower primary teachers. Unanimously the teachers agreed of the usefulness of SCORM
The final segment of the workshop was a writing lab geared towards UPSR BI P2 Sec C. The key elements of a narrative were reviewed. Due to time constraints, we were unable to go deep into Show It, Don’t Tell It. Overall the teachers found the workshop useful and were flying high in spirits.
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