Week 1
June 19th - June 25th
After weeks of contacts and negotiations, my LiA programme finally started. I made my first trip to the neighbourhood centre on Monday, and it was quite a journey. The site is much better equipped than I originally expected, with white board and a small class size of roughly 10, hence I would be able to tailor the class contents for my classes. However, much to my surprise, it does not have any projection equipment, so I would have to write on board. This was quite a blow to me at the beginning, but I were able to quickly adjusted and improved my board-writing skills later.
The contents for the first week were centred on Phonics, which is a handy tool for vocabulary learning. There were many relevant resources available in the Internet, yet they were too lengthy for a one-month class. Therefore, with information collected from communication with site managers and some of the student parents, I boldly cut half of the normal contents, leaving only phonics for alphabet letters. This innovation turned out to be much helpful: it not only shortened teaching time to one week, but also served as a tool to test the English ability of children attending the class. Feedbacks from kindergarten children were moderate, Phonics may still be too challenging to them. Classes for primary school students were perfect: we have both enjoyed the class time.
Communication skills and creative thinking were much rewarding for me during the week.