Today the English trainees have spent the morning at Patchway Community College with a class of year 7 students. We had the task to plan an hour lesson based on Greek Mythology. I must say, what creative specimens we are. We were grouped into pairs or a three, and I think we can all say it was a success!
My group decided to look at the story of Narcissus and Echo. We wanted to make an exciting lesson as we were completely alien and these “newbie’s” of the school had been pulled out of their class and brought in front of these three excited, smiling women who were fussing to make sure they were all ok. So we started the activity with the game of charades to “break the ice”, the moved swiftly on and read out the story. During the starter and the reading, one of the males of the group, didn’t want to participate. He was very shy and quiet, this may have been because he was a “cool dude” and didn’t want to look like he was enjoying education or we scared the living daylights out of him. Therefore, we suggested that he could join in whenever he wanted.
As a group, we divided the text into four scenes and then suggested that we were going to make a puppet show, which had an amazing response. All the children’s eyes lit up, even the introverted boy. So we started making puppets, the children chose which character they preferred and busily began creating their character. We had pipe cleaners, gems, tissue paper and feather, all over the place. Yet, the final pieces were phenomenal, the children were telling us why they were putting certain things on their puppet.
Next, we started the show as a group; we chose which background to use for each scene. I now didn’t mollycoddle the boy because he was now excited, shaking his puppet around the class, but fully participated within the show. This really showed me how some children are sensitive to new people and situations. Once he understood what was going on, and got use to us, he really came out of his shell. He was so proud of his Zeus puppet because all the other children wanted to take theirs home, yet, he wanted me to keep his puppet and show all my other children, how well he had done. I was so pleased; this made me feel really proud of the boy’s work and how he showed he enjoyed our lesson.
What an amazing day!! Well done girls!!
sarahkevans 