Thursday 29/05/08
Prac Block Day Fourteen

Ahh, another day in Boat C2. Today started with maths – a very disorganised maths lesson, where all the students – even those not completing the Money Games section, had a lesson in games. I helped run the billionaire, but it’s not one of my favourite things because the kids take ages to put it all together and hardly ever understand the writing each trade down.

After this, I walked around as the students did … man I totally can’t remember now. It would have been some kind of literacy though.

After this and morning tea, they had science. They have just started a new unit for science on Volcanoes. The lower group have to do basic volcano information and research, resulting in making a volcano themselves. The higher group have to investigate ways that volcanoes erupt and then, imagining that there is an active volcano in the area, come up with evacuation plans and road closures and general information about what to do when it erupts. They also have to present this information in any way they like – news reports, models, documentaries etc.

The students got into this fairly well, especially considering they are allowed to work in groups. The class had booked the school laptops for this lesson and I caught one of the students looking up volcano information on the Japanese version of Google. Man it’s great to be a language teacher sometimes.

After lunch the class had rich tasks and I stayed and watched the Bollywood dance group again. They didn’t do too much productive work, but they did plan out what they want to do with the performance of their song and have active goals for next lesson.

All in all a pretty standard day for school.