Introduction about Oxford English Shanghai Edition Book 1A

 Unit 8 Playtime

Longnan Primary School(龙南小学) Holly Wei(卫慧)

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to introduce my lesson.

There are 36 students in my class, 60 percent of them are not Shanghai natives, they come from different rural areas，some of them even couldn’t speak mandarin well. Their parents couldn’t provide them with good study environment, they have no tape recorders, some of them even have no desks. So I think it’s difficult for them to learn English. My students have only learnt some simple words and sentences, such as fruits, stationeries, numbers, “This is…” “It is...” “I can…” and so on. Their English expressions are very limited, but they all have very positive motivations towards learning English.

The aims of this lesson are to use words to identify objects in a typical playground, and to use sentences like “This is …” “I can see...” to describe the objects they see.     

Therefore I designed the final task like this: I gave two different pictures to each group of students sharing the same desk, let them observe the pictures and describe the objects that they see with “I can see…” or “This is …”. At the beginning of the class I asked some questions to review these sentences.

I used different ways to present the new words: show the picture, show the objective, play magic…and also I designed several kinds of ways to practice the new words: say a short chant, sing a little song, change the voices, make some sentences, do the actions, guessing game, patting game, quick response…The students’ attentions do not last very long, they like different stimulations. Therefore teacher should keep changing different methods to increase the study interest of students.

   For example, after teaching the word “bicycle”, I let the students replace the English song “Ride in my car?” The students finished singing the song of pleased rhythm with interest, switch the place to the garden naturally. In this part, I made use of the student's sense of hearing to draw their attention. Most of the students like songs, so it's a good way to let them concentrate on learning.

In the textbook, we needn't teach the students adjectives, but I think at the beginning of learning English students should have more contents to express their opinions. So when I teach the nouns, I give the students some adjectives, such as “big, small, yellow, red" and so on. I hope they would describe things using the information they’ve got. When they combined the new and old knowledge together, they felt a sense of achievement.

Although the students don’t need to learn alphabets in the first semester of the first grade, I think that the morphology of words can be a good aid to the students for memorizing words and getting their pronunciation right, and pave a solid foundation for learning alphabets and pronunciation. Based on this concern, I had intentionally showed my students the word cards for the purpose of training their abilities of distinguishing different words and their meanings.

It is the first time that my students are facing more than one teacher at the same time in the classroom, they might feel nervous and uneasy, I hope these kids can behave as usual. On the other hand, I hadn’t delivered any English class in the last academic year, it will not be strange to find that the lag of understanding and practicing the principles in English teaching between me and the other teachers. Last and not the least, since my administrative duties take a significant portion of my time, it will be most likely to have different kinds of shortcomings.