Reflection on Saturday Class

I spent most of this morning before class ignoring how nervous I was to teach my first English class at 9:30 am. Looking back, I know that there was no need to be nervous! By the time Haroun and I got coffee, my Saturday morning energy had set in; I am glad that we are teaching a morning class, be
cause I am not exhausted by

classes before needing to teach! The learners

came together on a bus from their residences nearby, so we got to meet everyone at once and get started soon after they arrived. English conversation bounced around the room as Haroun and I prepared to distribute the pre-test, as many of the students had a wonderful grasp of the language. One student claimed to know "zero English," but even he performed admirably on the pre-test with little assistance. The other learners were ready for a chance to get into some more complex conversation, and to show off their extensive vocabularies.

We began by having the students introduce themselves, then we played a picture identification game after the pre-test. Haroun left room for creativity in the challenge: "Come up with any word, describing anything in the picture, and come write it on the board." A picture of the West Bay area of Doha brought nearly the entire class to the white board, writing so many words that the board was completely filled! After a bit of spelling correction, all the learners could describe the picture more extensively than I would have ever thought.

After the break, we played hangman with some of the many words the learners wro

te in their notebooks during the picture identification game. They struggled a bit to match the partially completed word with a word in the notes they took, but the caught on as we played more rounds. This gave us a chance to teach vowels as well, as guessing a vowel is often a good place to start in hangman. All of the students were familiar with the letters of the alphabet, though sometimes they misidentified a particular letter.

The class ended with Uno, a card game that is popular in the United States. An Uno card is one of four colors and has one of ten numbers on the back, giving us a chance to teach the numbers and the colors red, blue, green and yellow. This was a really fun opportunity, because we

were able to play as entire class together (our class is only 8 people!) and you could see the learners identifying the numbers and colors correctly more and more as the game went on. And, best of all, the game got everyone laughing and smiling before the end!

The two hours went by quickly, and it feels wonderful knowing that the learners have a larger vocabulary and better conversational skills already! The best part, though, was watching the learners have fun while gaining the skills they came to gain. Our next class is already presenting us with challenge- what should we do to push the learners to a new level of conversation skills?

~Natalie