REFLECTION: 4th Week

Class has been cancelled. HOORAY!!! (HAHA... The positive side was : I didn't have to go to the class in the morning. Nice... But, the negative side is: I've been missing so much novel and valuable information and knowledge that they other group received.)

I knew from the other group that they have learnt how to print screen the day before. So I learnt from them and it’s looked so easy and simple. But, when tried to do it on my own laptop, it didn’t work the way they taught me. I need to press the fn key together with the prt sc key. It’s the first time I knew how to do it (haha… I really bad at technology). They also have been given a task to be completed. The task was to download Moyea software and using it they were to download several songs (one of the songs was waka waka). New software being introduced and to be tried.NICE...

REFLECTION: 3rd Week

Third week… more serious (as we given task to do). As usual, Pn. Foziah came to class with lots of stories to be shared. We enjoyed listening to her (and gave good response, added our own opinion and laughed when she told funny story. We weren’t the same, much better than last week. More responsive, more energetic, less passive). After chatting for several minutes, we came back to our business.

Opened the book (Teaching English in the Primary Classroom written by Susan Halliwell), the first chapter: Working with young language learners. Interesting topic, wasn’t it? There were 6 subtopics. So, we’re divided into 6 groups, each group got one subtopic to be read, summarised, discussed, put into the Power Point and presented. I was in the Fifth group which responsible for the fifth subtopic: The role of imagination.

First of all, what is imagination? Imagination is considered "a power of the mind," "a creative faculty of the mind." We found out that imagination benefits the young learners in certain ways like encourages a rich vocabulary, stimulate their interest to speak as well as could enhance creativity.

In my opinion, they will learn lots of vocabulary in describing what they imagined especially nouns, adjectives and verb (with the help of teacher, parents in giving the exact words the child looking for). For example, the dragon has huge eyes with red eyeballs…or there is a beautiful enormous palace...crawling down the mountain. Imagination stimulates their interest to speak as they would feel very excited to share what they imagined. Even if they couldn’t speak fluently and correctly, but they would try to speak and use the language to convey their stories and anything they have imagined. Children could enhance creativity through imagination as they think something out of ordinary and sometimes could be weird and definitely nonsense and do not exist.

We also discussed on how to encourage children imagination. Here are several possible activities to be done in the classroom:

• problem solving
• drawing
• storytelling and
  
• role play.

So, once I become a teacher, I should involve my students in these activities to enhance their imaginations.

REFLECTION: 2nd Week

Second week…more things to share. First thing first; electing the leader and treasurer (and this was where the problem started). Pn. Foziah asked for anyone who volunteered to be the leader a.k.a KK. You know the culture of our polite and shy and humble M’sians, no one wanted to volunteer (including me, I knew I couldn’t). Pn. Foziah seemed didn’t like the situation. Then, she required several names to be nominated. The first name being suggested was Hazwan (or his commercial name, Bahak). Then, someone nominated Faiz. (We took a very long time just to find someone to be the leader). Pn. Foziah asked if there’s other name to be added to the list, then Atikah suggested Dominic. We were very lucky that Dominic volunteered himself to be the treasure. Fuhh!! One problem solved. Next, came back to the leader election. To save the time (that have been wasted), Pn. Foziah made her decision and choose Hazwan. Done! Enough with the election.

I didn’t know why we’re so passive that day. When she asked us questions and hoped for response, we didn’t open our mouths to give feedback as expected that made her blood boiled. She’s so upset. She claimed that it’s because there were more girls (she meant young ladies) than boys (gentlemen) in our class. Maybe… Then she gave us a set of questionnaire to be answered (HONESTLY. I did response honestly, hehe).

Move on to the most important part. We have been introduced to a term; touch typing. Typing without really look at the keyboard and not pressing the keys (letters) one by one (this was what I understood). (But then, I searched for the definition from the internet. 1. Typewriting in which the fingers are trained to hit particular keys; typist can read and type at the same time wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn 2. Touch typing is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location through muscle memory.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing). So, I still didn’t have the touch typing skill as to type, I needed to find the keys and I couldn’t read and type at the same time.

Besides, Pn. Foziah also talked about the blog (she asked us to update our blogs), portfolio (we were asked to compile our portfolios) and the collection of teaching aids. So, after the class I should work on these things slowly.