Newbie

My 8pm on Thursday was a basic level student who had only been here with Smith's School of English Kyobashi for 2 weeks. Before the class, I had chatted with the previous teacher and was told that the new student was a bit shy. I decided not to do anything too challenging and try to keep the atmosphere nice and friendly to him.

After greeting him in the lobby and offered him a nice cup of hot tea, I showed him to the classroom. I spent a few minutes introducing myself and getting him to talk about himself a bit, which I knew shouldn't be hard as he had done it with the other teacher in the very first trial lesson. As expected, he was relived and happy to use the sentence patterns and some new vocabulary he learned earlier to introduce himself. I gave him a big thumb-up after his introduction since the kid really did a great job applying what he learned from his trial here.

We then went over his previous one-point, and proceeded to the Routine part of the class. Since he had done routine 1 once, I thought it would be a good idea to review and consolidate. I also prepared some picture cards from Time 1 for him to string together "John's Day" using the stretching skill taught in routine 1.

I then introduced him to the item of the day, "ordinal numbers". This lesson is always good for basic level students because it provides a lot of activities and students get a lot of chances to practice. Once I wrote down some ordinal numbers on the board and listed the 3 major usages, it was time to put the knowledge in use. I pulled out the curriculum activity book and basically followed the practice and development part of the lesson plan.

By the end of the 45 minute-lesson, the shy new student was no where to be found, instead I found myself giving a one-point to this smiley chatty university boy! It surely felt good to be the teacher who improved the confidence of your students!