After a break of 3 weeks, we finally return to the Little Wings center for our 3rd lesson. Honestly, I think we were rather prepared for this lesson, at least more prepared than the previous 2 lessons, and the content that we planned to cover was simple. Much preparation was done and I was confident that it was going to be a good lesson...
Entering the classroom somehow lifted our spirits, and we had tons of time, since we were 30 minutes early (thanks to the fast cab!), and we took our time to prepare for lesson. Then when the kids finally settled down, we started lessons. To be honest, I was quite worried as Shaun was going to deliver the lessons. No offense but I felt he wasn't too familiar with the new edited slides. Or what if the kids could not understand him? But after the first 10 minutes of lesson, I just couldn't help but sit back and smile in relief at how Shaun delivered the lesson. The way he interacted with the kids was brilliant! He was able to capture the kid's attention and deliver the content with ease. For that, I really admired his performance today. Well done, Shaun!
However, things just had to go haywire at the second part of the lesson... With 40 minutes to spare, we have gladly proceeded on the the worksheet, which we estimated would take 15- 20 minutes. But it took the rest of the 40 minutes and we barely managed to do 2 out of the 3 parts of the worksheet...
We had overestimated the children's English standard. This is, however, a fault of our own, as it shows the lack of prior research and even a test to know the children's standard of English and drawing. And with this, the rest of our lesson plans will have to be abandoned....
This is a lesson that we have to learn. To do our prior research and not jump into building on unjustified assumptions. Here, we assumed that the children's standard of English was of a certain level that allowed them to write out their own little story. Why didn't we find out the English standards of the children beforehand? Why were we so sure the children would be able to complete the task we give them? I think we should reflect deeply on this, and make sure that it would never happen again...
However, this is not the end of our RESL journey! (Of course not...) Now, the most important thing is to re-craft our lesson plans for all the subsequent lessons and decide on what is it that we want the children to be able to produce after all the lessons at the finale. This calls for yet another long RE-meeting... However, the Mid-year Common Test are just around the corner, so let us just draft up lesson 4 plan, and leave the rest till after Mid-years. Okay?
I think today was not really a setback, and I think we did reasonably well! So, let's not be disheartened by the realization of our mistake, but try our best to work around it and deliver the rest of the lessons just as well. WE CAN DO IT!!! =D
Ping Chong
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