My cultural lesson used masks to convey different types of emotions. My 3rd grade class was leaning about different emotions in their TB. During the previous lessons, the students learned the phrases “Are you sick/sad/happy/angry/scared/hungry?” and “Yes, I am” and “No, I’m not”. At the end of the lesson, there is a section in the TB that introduces a cultural connection with the material. This time the lesson involved face masks from Korean and they showed different emotions. I decided to take one step future and create a game (Jeopardy style) where they had to describe the emotions of masks from different cultures.
If there was a lesson where
things went wrong, it was surely this one. At the start of the class, the
students came extremely late. Due to this, I had to try to push the lesson in.
This was obviously a mistake, because the students are low-level young learners
and they need time to process things a lot more. Also, in the middle of the
lesson, my co-teacher was called for other duties, so I had to teach the lesson
without any translator, so it proved to be rather challenging to get some of
the instructions across.
The activity started with a
short video clip from the book. It showed different masks from Korea and
explained the emotions that showed. The students were able to answer and
identify which emotions the masks were conveying.
I started the activity by
introducing what the game was, but I’m not sure if the students understood my instructions.
On my PPT, there were two columns, ‘Asia’ and ‘World’. I tried to explain to
the students that the masks are grouped in this way. As we started to play the
game by showing the first mask, I asked the students to talk with their team. I
tried to create some type of discourse and asked them to find two things. First
was the emotion the mask showed and second was where the mask was from. The
students didn’t talk much the first time and just raised their hands
individually. After I kept drilling them to talk with their friends and gave
them a time limit, they started to speak more and more.
I tried my best to elicit the
phrase “I’m _____.” Usually the students like to give only one word answers, so
my goal for the lesson was to have them use the emotions they learned and say
the phrase together as a team. The big problem with this activity was the fact
that as I was going through each team and asking them for answers the other
students was doing other things. Many times during the lesson I had to elicit answers
and other students were just sitting around doing nothing.
With the cultural part of
the activity, I wasn’t sure if I created a strong cultural awareness for the
students. I should have put on the three countries on the PPT for the students
to choose from. This would have made it clearer for the students. Instead I just
threw the terms at them and didn’t have them create an entire sentence. I did
my best to explain some directions to the students and it took some time for
adjustments.
Overall, considering all the
things that went wrong, the lesson was not all that bad. The students seemed
genuinely interested in the activity and where the masks were from. I had a
hard time creating a real discourse, but I think for these low-level learners
it was good practice and wrap-up of the terms and phrases that we have learned.
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