On July 27th I taught my sixth practicum hour in the conversation cafe. I am officially over the halfway point of my practicum hours. I have been really impressed by the turnout and participation of the students. The conversation cafe is a completely optional activity for the students during their Language and Culture program at TRU. Out of the 23 students registered in the 4-week program, I have 18 students who show up to each class. I am even more impressed by the fact that some of the students are required to do one on one meetings during the start of class and that they choose to join the class once they are finished. It has been incredible getting to know these students.
Today we focused on vocabulary work. The words we used today were from the Academic word list from the last class. To start the class we started with our “stars” and “wishes” from the weekend. This is the second Monday I have used this icebreaker and I find it to be a really great way to start the week. It sets the tone for participation expectations and it helps build my relationships with the students. In the next portion, we focused on context and using a word in context. For example, our context was presentations, so when we examined the word clarity. There were two definitions of clarity. The first is clearness or understanding; freedom from indistinctness. The second is the state or quality of being clear or transparent to the eye. As a class, we decided which definition fits our context. Then they had to discuss why? This was our most successful discussion in the program so far. Next, I had pre-constructed sentences that the students chose words to fill into blanks. The class was split into breakout rooms for this activity. It was the most successful breakout room use as well. They all communicated (even if it was through the chatbox) and recorded their answers. At the completion of the breakout rooms then were all able to put their groups work into the shared notes (another first!). I think they are more confident this week with how they need to use and interact with the technology.
I’m excited to use the sentences the groups created in the next lesson. There were some groups that made slight sentence errors, so I will have the class work together to fix the sentences. I believe this week will be a lot more doing with the students, and hopefully more talking. After this class, I am optimistic that they will be using their mic more often.