Week 7
21 August 2011 – 25 August 2011


A week before Raya. I bet everybody was in the mood of Raya and could not really focus to works or schools. Nevertheless, responsibilities needed to be implemented. Schools kids need to learn. School teachers need to teach.

I was supposed to be observed by my mentor, Puan Parah Zahani on Monday. She needed to see me using ICT in the classroom. We scheduled everything on Monday. However, she needed to attend a meeting during my English period on Monday. Therefore, I postponed my Monday lesson to Thursday, and brought my Thursday lesson to Monday.

Along with the festival mood, I taught my pupils with the topic of “Festive Cheers”. On Monday, I asked them to design a greeting card of Hari Raya Aidilfitri. I distributed a piece of art drawing paper to each pupil. I asked them to fold the paper to half and to design the paper as a beautiful and creative greeting card. Initially, I limited them to write only in English. But then, I could see that lots of Raya wishes wordings were not in English. Therefore, I allowed them to write in English and Arabic only.

Amazingly, that was the very first time where the pupils did not asked for my permission to go out to the toilet. Previously, they just love to frequently go out, even to the toilet. I could see that they focus their almost total attention to the greeting card design and creation. Even though they were wandering around to their friends’ places, but they were actually doing their work! I joined them with their work by monitoring them using the scissors when they needed to cut out the coloured papers to be pasted on the greeting cards.

I could also see how much they love art. They asked me a lot of new vocabularies to be inserted into their greeting cards. I helped them out for a few difficult words, but encouraged them more to look out for the words in their dictionaries.

From this activity, the only problem I could see was to make them to sit at their places. However, I think it was only a minor problem. Kids are kids. Being active is in their young blood. The victory that I had accomplished here was to tackle their interest and focus to the lesson. Not only I taught them some English, but I integrated the art skill as well.

The conclusion that I could make out from this lesson is that these kids enjoy art. In future, I think I need to figure out more activities like this which involve art to have their total focus and attention to the lesson.

On Thursday, I had an observation session with Puan Parah Zahani. According to my previous experiences having my English class in the computer lab, I have transferred my ICT-based lesson to the Science lab. I chose such venue because it has been installed with the white screen and the pupils could sit in groups whereby the tables and stools were arranged in grouping manner.

From my personal judgement, my class control was still hectic. I have numbered them so that they could be in groups mixing around with their other classmates and not only with their cliques, but I could see that some of them were pretending by forgetting their numbers and simply joined any groups that they wanted.

Personally, I have no idea on how to control the situation. I guess I need to be stricter in the later future even though I thought I have been strict enough.