First handout on observations at School nº 246, Santa Rosa La Pampa.

1. FIRST HANDOUT ON OBSERVATIONS.
- School nº 246.
- 4th year.
- English.
- Mentor Teacher: Nadina Rodríguez Cornaglia.
- Trainee: Ana Belén Zabala.
When you first enter this classroom, you will see three rows of desks
(three desks per row) probably when pupils have to work in groups,
teachers change the organization of desks. Then, what you will find is lots
of posters done by students about: La Pampa province, the planets,
birthdays, etc. and also, six big shelves where they keep most of the school
objects that belongto the schoolnot to the pupils, so that whenthey need
for example glue and they do not have their own one, they can take
advantage from the one of the school. Finally, what you will find is the
sound of students' voices, interacting with each other, a very pleasant
sound.
As regards routines, it was seen that the teacher always starts the class
with greetings and end up with saying good bye, after entering to the
classroom, bothteacher and pupils, state the date and also one of them is
chosen as "assistant" of the teacher that day. Then, once they have
finished with the every class’ routine, the teacher reviews previous
concepts trying to make them not only remember but also participate.
After a revision of previous concepts, they are ready to work individually
with a new set of activities on their notebooks. In general, they are more
or less near to finish every task the teacher gives them to work in class. In
this case, this lesson was based on Birthdays and Special Dates.
With reference to the use of resources in the classroom, the teacher
generally makes use of the blackboard, she gives them also different set of
copies with different activities to work with, and of course their
green notebooks are always present. Up to the moment they have not
worked in the library or with computers.
According to the dynamic of the classes, the teacher explains the
instructions before providingthe students with the activities, and then she
performs at least one of the activities on the board, so as to provide them

2. withscaffolding. Also, any time a student participates correctly she praises
them with comments such as: Very good! or Great! These positive
comments motivate students allthe time to still workingand participating.
In general, if necessary the teacher makes corrections orally in a very
gently way and if they have made a mistake she also gives them some time
to think about their mistakes. Only when they have a test the grade is
present in the paper after she has corrected it at home.
As regards the students grouping, they are fourteen pupils, six of them
are girls and the other eight are boys, it was seen that they all have a very
good relationship, they do not have problems as regards cooperation or
collaboration and in general, they need more or less ten minutes to start
working in class. Also, it was seen that not all the classes they are sat with
the same classmate, maybe because of another teacher' decision, but
anyway they do not seem to have any conflict with this type of
organization.
Finally, the lesson was really clear and well organized, the sequence
started with: the teacher entered the class and all the pupils greeted her
with a beautiful song (yellow, blue, yellow, blue, hello teacher how are
you?). Then, the teacher and the boys and girls stated the date in the
calendar, and the teacher talked a little bit about our next holidays (17th
and 20th of June) All this considered as ROUTINES. After this, the class
started with the REVISION of previous concepts, in this case, "Birthdays"
"There is/are" "How many/much" and then they start working on the first
task in whichthey have to describe throughthe images what was going on
(Luke's birthday). New vocabulary connected with birthdays was
presentedthroughthis activity and also numbers were presented so as to
count for example: presents, and candles. Finally, pupils checked the
activity all together as a whole class and after the teacher gave them
feedback she wrote on the blackboard instructions for the following two
exercises, one of them related to counting and the other one related to
answering some questions, before working on the tasks the teacher
perform herself one section of each exercise so as to provide them with
scaffolding.
To conclude the class, the teacher collected her materials and said
Good-Bye!