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.