Hello again friends! This is the fourth week now. How time flies and it's now AUGUST!
Anyway, in class today, we continued our group presentations of the first topic. My group was first and we explained about the role of a teacher in helping children understand the meaning of words. Basically, children are not born "stupid". They already possess the innate knowledge, but it is now the teacher's job in bringing them out. What I realised from the feedback session by Pn. Foziah was the importance of the teacher's role. A teacher is the key element because they are the ones giving the children cues to help them understand the meaning of words. I only thought that with the combination of teaching aids and teaching techniques, it will be sufficient to teach children, but now I know that the teacher himself plays the biggest role. If the teaching aids and techniques used were flawless but the teacher himself does not put in effort to teach, there will be no difference made in the children.
From Asraf's group presentation, I learnt that life is all about play and play and MORE play for children. They need fun in order to learn, but compared to the traditional classroom condition where chalk-and-talk method was used, there was hardly any fun in that (it wasn't for me, now that I think about it). Therefore, it is very necessary for a teacher to insert elements of fun whenever possible in the midst of a teaching and learning process. Now you may ask, if children play games all the time, when will they learn anything? The beauty about children is that indirect learning occurs. This means that by playing games (especially language games), they will learn the language indirectly. For instance, when children play the spelling bee game, they also learn how to spell words while having fun at the same time. I think it's a great gift that God has given the children because they are able to learn and also have fun. In fact, they learn better when they have something exciting accompanying that learning experience!
In Woo's presentation, it was interesting to know that even though children's knowledge of language may be limited, they can still be very creative with the language. I find it very amusing when a child says "Switch off the dark." They sound so adorable because they always have the "I-am-right" innocent look. Then again, it is our responsibility to teach them the correct language. As a teacher, it is important for me to give the children many opportunities to construct the language. For example, through the use of songs, children can learn to refine the language in a fun yet memorable way. An example of song could be "This is the Way". Since some of the lines are repeated, the children would be able to say the lines correctly. To me, there is no such thing as being too young and immature to learn anything because younger children are already able to say a sentence even if they don't understand what they are saying. Here, I learn that as a teacher, I cannot underestimate any child's ability because everyone has different capacity of learning.
Lastly, Nizam's group presentation was on the power of imagination. I am sure that even now, we can still remember some of the impossible things we thought we could do when we were younger! To us then, everything seemed to be so possible and easily achieved, but reality crashed hard on us as we grew up. A question was asked after the presentation: what is imagination in educational context? I would say the power of creative thinking put to good use in academic. Frankly, in a child's mind, there is no limitation on their creative thinking. They are free to explore anything and to them, everything is possible no matter how impossible the idea sounds. This is one aspect that I as a teacher need to develop and put to good use. For instance, if they are able to channel their creative thoughts in their writing, the essays would definitely come out spectacular!!
After the presentation, we were asked to do a tutorial on how to find the waka waka song, lyrics and video. A few websites were introduced such as www.4shared.com and www.metacafe.com.
Pn Foziah also taught us how to use the Moyea Flv downloader to download video clips. Wow! So many things came at once! At first, I couldn't catch up to what she was saying because it took me a while to find the song, but when I do, I realised that it wasn't so hard after all. To me, if this is a learning process that I need to go through in order to be an all-rounder 21st century educator, then I am all for that!
That's it for this week. See you!
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