The First Day of Remedial Class

Today is the first day of summer remedial class.   As soon as the students entered the classroom, I handed them the book they're going to read and a packet, with the syllabus, a handout of Chapter 1, and a seating chart in it.

On the syllabus is the information about the date, time, agenda and report allocation for each class.  Attached to it is another page regarding the grading criterion, do's and dont's, and tips on reading a novel.  

The handout for Chapter 1 provides the students with examples of their  written report, including a summary,  Q & A, a glossary, and Discussion. 

I'm glad that I gave the students the seating chart.  It saved a lot of time.   Seeing the chart, they quickly seated themselves.  Below the name is the name of a character in the book so that they know who should read his/her line(s) when cued. 

After the routine work, including my self-introduction, giving the rules, and telling the students what we're going to do during the 8 days, we started the lesson.

First, I guided them to find out some important information of the book: the title, the author, the publisher, and the year of publication.  (Oops!  I forgot the page and the chapter numbers.)  Then we read the book together.  Since I was going to demonstrate the oral report, they had to have some idea about the story.  For the first 5 pages, I read aloud to them, interwoven with each character reading their lines and some Q & A's .  Then the bell rang. 

After 10 mintues' break, we resumed the class.   The students read the remaining 9 pages of the chapter silently for 25 minutes.  After that came my demonstration.  I summarized the chapter, asked questions, and introduced some new words.   It was a pity that I didn't have enough time to complete the discussion of important or difficult sentence structures.  

Thanks to good preparation, the class went smoothly.  

Here I have to thank Anna (張倚鳳老師) for generously sharing her handouts for last year's summer remedial class.  She had the students read A Night in Terror Tower, a book in the Goosebumps series.   Though I am using a different book, I learned to be better organized from her.