Journal

The third week of the teaching practice allowed me to observe the two classes more carefully and made me confident about beginning to teach my activities.

The B1+ class continued the practice on the conditionals. The teacher gave a specific time to the students in order to complete the exercises in the classroom and she walked around the class to check and help students. When a student finished an exercise, she went to his desk and corrected it. A topic they focused on this week was "phobias". They explained the difference between fear and phobia in a class discussion and then each student spoke about his own phobia. As for homework, they were assigned to find some weird phobias on the internet and then discuss it in the classroom the following week.

The students of the B2 level class had to make an oral presentation of their written essays this week. The topic was: "students who do not do well at the exams should not go to school trips, do you agree?" The students stood up in front of the class and presented their essays orally. The teacher intervened whenever she considered it necessary. She added some useful points and helped the students continue speaking. The students were asked to do many speaking activities this week, such as, describing pictures, discussing about an important matter of today's society and role plays. The teacher intervened when the pupils talked in order to provide helpful advice and some expressions for them to memorize.

All in all, these past three weeks helped me comprehend a lot of things about teaching in a real classroom. I became really excited and I am looking forward to teaching my own activities in the weeks to follow.

The second week of the teaching practice was as interesting and useful as the first one. It gave me the possibility to make some more careful observations about the two classes and its students.

The B1+ level class focused on sports and working out. The students did a reading exercise in class that lasted for 15 minutes. All of the students read the text aloud by taking turns. Then, they were given 5 minutes to answer multiple choice questions about it. I noticed that when they were correcting the exercise, the teacher asked them in which line they had found each answer. After doing a lot of vocabulary exercises about sports, the teacher asked each individual student to answer some questions about this topic. She asked questions like: "what is you favorite sport?", " do you prefer going to the gym or being part of a team?" "why is it important to do sports?" etc. In this week, the students were also introduced to the conditionals. The teacher explained the grammar rules concerning the conditionals orally by providing examples on the board. The students did many exercises about the three conditionals, some of which were conducted in pair-work during the class. Finally, they took a 10 minute test on conditionals. A specific event that attracted my attention happened during a gap-filling exercise on conditionals. A student laughed at another student's answer and that was done in a very rude way. My mentor scolded the student who did that and explained that he should never do this again and that it is not funny at all.

The students of the B2 class had submitted written stories the previous week. The teacher handed them out to the students corrected and stated some common mistakes that they did. For instance, she said that some students had used the wrong tense and then explained that we used past simple and past continuous when describing a series of events. The students did some more exercises on infinitives and gerunds in their grammar book. When correcting a multiple choice exercise, the students often raised their hands to say that they chose a different option. The teacher explained why that option was incorrect and the other one, correct. What really caught my attention is that the teacher repeated the answers many times to make sure that the pupils had listened and understood them. Moreover, the class focused on vocabulary about professions through multiple choice activities and synonym that are found in the coursebook. My mentor often encouraged the students to speak by asking some random questions about jobs, their ideal job, qualifications, duties, etc. She also devoted a whole lesson to listening activities concerning professions.

All considered, my teaching practice experience continued smoothly in this second week. I consider it equally important as the first one because I was able to figure out a lot of useful things about the two classes.

The first week of my teaching practice in Moraitis School was an absolutely amazing experience for me. I observed the first (B1+ level) and second year (B2 level) of gymnasium classes. I have to admit that I really liked entering a classroom again after 4 years of graduating from the Greek Lyceum.

When I first entered the B1+ class I realized that both the teacher and the students speak only in the English language. However, there were times when students used the Greek language to explain something that they could not explain in English. The teacher was always speaking in English, apart from when she was explaining grammar. In that case, she could speak in Greek to explain some difficult phenomena. In this first week, the B1 class focused on reported speech as far as grammar is concerned and vocabulary exercises and listening activities about professions. Because of the fact that this class consisted of more boys than girls, I could say that the teacher tried hard in order to maintain discipline. She was always checking if the pupils had done the exercises, brought the books or were paying attention to the lesson.

The B2 class was a really interesting class to observe as the pupils of this class are sitting the FCE examination on the 14th of May. As a matter of fact, the lessons are a preparation for them in order to succeed in the exam and students are very concentrated on their goal. In the first week, I observed that the level of English in this class is very high and they can use more sophisticated words when speaking in English. In the first week of my attendance, I saw that the students do many practice tests both at home and in the classroom. They keep a record of their correct answers and then they inform the teacher. For example, after finishing the "Use of English" section of the practice test, my mentor asked them: "how many correct answers did you have?" Then, the students answered: " 30 out of 40 or 35 out of 40". They also focused a lot on activities that included inversion, gerunds and infinitives. The teacher explained these grammatical features on the whiteboard many times so that the students can become fully aware of them and assigned exercises to do in class or for homework.

All in all, the first week of my attendance in Moraitis School was very important as I was able to gather a lot of information about the classes I am going to teach later on and about teaching generally. I feel really enthusiastic and I cannot wait to experience the following stages of the teaching practice.