Our first class today was grammar, booo!!!  I can just about manage verbs and nouns.  However, I had a few wires springing out of my head when the teacher started talking about pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, determiners and conjunctions.  Boing!!  Until today I had never heard of determiners and conjunctions, did I miss that class in school? :oS

See how well you can do, describe this sentence in terms of nouns, verbs, determiners, conjunctions, etc.:

The girl from the town was eating her lunch in the nearby restaurant.

Answer at the end of the blog.

Kamal then threw in intransitive, transitive and ditransitive verbs for good measure, which was complete double Dutch to me.

The next lesson was much more fun.  It was about how to warm up your class, this involved playing games like Hangman, Simon Says, etc.  The purpose is to relax the students, getting them engaged in basic conversation and can provide a link into the lesson.  For my warm up assessment I played the Hokey Pokey.

Then we moved on to context modelling to set the scene of the lesson.   My lesson was about fruit, so I drew an apple and a banana on the whiteboard and got the class to guess the object;  I then asked questions like what colour is it, where does it grow, etc.  I wish I took pictures of some the drawings; there are a few budding Picassos amongst us – very abstract.

Well I was warned that the TEFL assessment is very critical, so I wasn’t too bruised from my slating.  The lady moderator was not impressed with my context modelling.  I should have done more drawings, I should not have written my questions on the board and I should not have rubbed out my previous drawings/answers.  I feel like I should be writing lines tonight :o(

The last task of the day was another foreign language walk.  I had to write 6 sentences in English then again find a local to provide the Nepali equivalent.  My Swiss friend and I tried a cafe, but the waiter was a bit grumpy and wouldn’t help us.  Plan B worked much better, we found a bar and over a beer got the barman to translate for us.  The only problem now is I have to learn all the sentences to present to the class tomorrow, good job I didn’t have too many beers.

Grammar Answer: