On the last week of school, my mentor gave me the opportunity to conduct one of my SPAG lessons in front of the 3P students. Originally, I had planned to teach this lesson at 10:15am, during our English slot, but due to an improptu Robotics Seminar we moved the time of the lesson to 8am in the morning. Before I began my lesson, I asked the students to take out their English book and their pencils and have their eyes focused on me to indicate that they are ready to begin. For those who were waiting for the rest of the class to be ready, I asked the former to think about whether or not they have heard the word "prepositions".

Once everyone was ready, I moved to our readiness activity and asked them to describe the location of certain objects in the classroom. I instructed the students to be descriptive when letting me know the location of the objects. Then, I moved on to our engagement activity and pointed out the connection between the words they used to describe the location of certain objects in the classroom to the concept of preposition. After I explicitly stated the definition of prepositions, I asked the students if they could give me other words they could think of that can be used to describe where things are. When they ran out of ideas, I showed them a word mat with a visual representation of the different prepostions, so they can picture how the prepositions can be used. To further check their understanding, I conducted another activity for the students to use different prepositions in a sentence using the different images on the screen. Once it looked like everyone was familiar with prepositions, I moved to my mastery activity, which was a worksheet they needed to complete that would help them to achieve the lesson objective of the lesson.

LO: I am able to identify prepositions

As they worked, I went around the classroom to see if students understood the instruction on the worksheet, answered the questions, and checked their work. Fortunately, all the kids were able to finish their worksheet and have it checked by me before they went off for their breakfast.

Before the lesson I felt very nervous. This was the first time I would teach a lesson to 3P as a whole. Previously, I was only able to work with certain members of the classroom (Blue, Green, Yellow group). I would select one group at a time, and bring them to the library to conduct a recap lesson, just to ensure they would recall and understand the previous SPAG lesson. A part of me felt worried that I would not be able to take control of the class, as well as my mentor has. Since it's only been a week and a half since the students came back to school, I didn't know if they would be rambunctious during the lesson, worse, not interested. I did feel confident in my lesson. I've looked at many different resources online, scoured for engaging learning activities that was most effective with a large group of people, as well as practiced how to deliver the content. I was also able to show my mentor my lesson plan a week in advance, just so that I covered what needs to be taught about that particular lesson based on the UK National Curriculum. During the teaching experience I felt exhilirated. Everything that I had planned in term of activities and the student's behaviour exceeded my expectations. They were all very engaged and actively participated in the discussion. I had a lot of hands come up, when I asked them a question and the group of students who answered weren't the same group of people. Therefore, I could tell that many of them understood the content. At the end of the lesson, I felt very proud of myself because based on their participating in the readiness activity and the mastery activity, there were evidence that the students understood the lesson. Even the Yellow/Orange group, which were considered to be low ability.

What was good about this experience is that the students were able to understand the content and achieved the learning outcome. What contributed to the success of this teaching experience is that everyone participated and there was no misbehaviour. Maybe because it was done very early in the morning, the students were prepared and ready to learn. Another reason it went well was because I was able to use scaffolding in the lesson for the students' benefit. I started from the bare bones of the lesson, and slowly built it up for there. Honestly, I don't think it would have been successful if I didn't start my lesson the way I did. The use of visual aids in the readiness activity, coupled by my criteria that the students needed to answer their questions in detail, rather than stating "there", to describe where an object really helped (The IRIS Center, 2005). By systematically building on their skill in the readiness activity, I was able to challenge the students through discovery and deep learning, engaged the studenst in meaningful discussion, as well as increase the likelihood for the students to meet their lesson objectives (Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, 2012). What didn't go so well is that I was unable to provide additional resources just in case a student finished early. I planned an extra activity for students to do, should they finish the mastery activity, but one student was able to finish all the task, therefore when he was done, there was nothing left for him to, so he just sat there looking bored.What I learned from this experience, is that scaffolding a lesson can greatly contribute to the success of a lesson. By giving the students the blocks to learn, they can easily grasp their understanding of a material much more quickly, than if they were not given it. Also, I realized that you should always have another back up activity for your back up activity just in case a student finishes really quickly. I will definitely learn to do so in my next teaching experience.