Rafa's diary

The real sussex diary

So far, for more than ten days I've been living in a kind of student hotel, really near The Sussex University, in Falmer, where I've been given a training course for teachers.

Monday

The very first day we met Tom and Melanie at the University, where they explained the most important hings related to this course. Melanie gave us some of the most important helpful hints to avoid any "dangerous experience". After that It was Tom's turn to introduce himself and go through the schedule. Finally he put into practice a game which let us know each other much better. In the afternoon Tom was teaching us some speaking skills.

Tuesday

This morning we've had an interesting class based on intonation, I've found really interesting the game called "the telegram game", I think, this kind of game can get all the students very motivated easily as well as the other pronunciation game, based on "Guided discovery", in order to spot the difference between different sounds. After the break we had another speech on bilingualism, but this time, the speech doesn't worth it since, to be honest, I wasn't really interersted in the topic he was telling us. It was a very theoretical class and I think no one was able to get involved in it.

Wednesday

During the class we've been given a brief induction into the Brighton's history by Alexandra, another teacher. By listening her explanations, I could find out some quite interesting aspects about Brighton, such as how the old Brighton Pier was set on fire on purpose because of the insurance, or how Brighton was intended to be conquered many times. Besides, the teacher showed us some displays about what she was telling us. After the break we went into the city of Brighton, where Niki was the person in charge to take us around the downtown. There, we could see some of the places described by Alexandra in the morning

Thursday

Today we've been taught several ways of teaching pronunciation, intonation and phonetics. Tom's prepared a quite interesting class as we've had the chance both to leran and enjoy the lessons since all the topics were really funny for me. First of all, we've been singing "The Grand Old Duke of York song", a really good way of practising pronunciation and intonation, and then we've played a kind of game that consists of getting out of the classroom as soon as possible adn to take a lokk at a piece of paper on the wall and try to memorize some of the information contained on the sheet and then dictate it to my colleagues. In my opinion, the two activities are really fun and I think children may well get involved by doing them, and as we know, the more enjoyable is the activity, the faster kids are able to leran it. Moreover, I truly think that I could use the second activity as a warm-up ectivity in my subject (Phys. Ed.)

Friday

Today we've had an interesting class based on how to use the interactive whiteboard. There's no doubt that it's a useful resource to teach any subject in a faster way, and also enjoyableway for all the kids. The interactive whiteboard lets you lots of possibilities to turn the lesson to be taught that day into a quite attractive stuff for the students. This tyoe of resource would be useful at the very beginning of every pre-sport class, in order to show them what you want to teach them, and also each specific movement.

Weekend

I spent this weekend in London, where a friends from the course and I were wandering around the downtown. It was a tyring activity, as we walked the whole day, but It was worth seeing the main London's landmarks. Next day I met an old classmate from Madrid Who I was eating in Hyde park with. After the lunch we went for a walk through the main London's streets. Finally , at eight o'clock, we took the train to Brighton to have a deserved rest at home.

Monday

We’ve been taught how to create and customise our own blog. I strongly think that this is an interesting and funny activity in order to share all the information with people you want to, and it also provides you with the possibility of knowing more details about differents topics you are interested in. I found quite interesting the course in many parts of it, although most of the activities in the course are useful to be taught in the classroom, and, since I'm teaching Phys. Ed. I will have to adjust them to my subject.