Pre-Primary teachers in Oxford. Days 6 and 7

Good evening friends. Just a one note to tell you about last lessons!

Yesterday we did something different to take the classroom tasks up afterwards our touristic weekend. Every classmate talked about how their free days were: who travelled furthest from Oxford, who spent a bomb or got compeletely ripped off, who ate the most traditional English food or someone who was at loose because its plans fell through. In this way, the teacher introduced a new appropriate vocabulary and expressions for a particular topic. It was an efficient warm up technique to restart the second week course. We also updated our English through activities like Verb patterns (adding -ing to the verb or using the infinitive) and True or false? (to recognize some words and it's meaning in a correct subject). We finished with 101 ways to praise our pupils and encourage them to learn more and more English!

Today we've spent the whole morning doing practical pronunciation. We could verify the complexity of the English phonic alphabet practicing all the sounds and checking our mistakes with the teacher. We did a word stress and a connected speech exercises. On the one hand, stressed syllable in a word is usually noticeable by being slightly louder, slightly higher in pitch than the syllables next to it. On the other hand, when native English speakers speak naturally their words are not separated, they join together. This can make listening difficult as it's often unclear where one word ends and another word begins. It can also change the sounds of words. As a conclusion, we've firmly convinced that intonation is more important than grammar mistakes in a concrete communicative context.

In the afternoon we've lived a pleasant surprise visiting The Story Museum with children (recommended by our classmates). This museum celebrates stories in all forms and explores their enduring power to teach and delight. It is located in a quirky building in the center of Oxford than provided us several ideas to get our own school more attractive. We could design some existing spaces to create innovative story experiences to spark the imagination of all age pupils. Certainly,
we've been thinking about our little students seeing our sons enjoying Time for bed activity (brilliant storyteller) or Talking Throne game, where the whole family browsed an extensive collection of costumes, picked an outfit, walked up the red carpet and heared the amazing talking throne announce us. It was absolutely hilarious!
 



See you in the next post. Regards!