Each class period lasted 40 minutes long, but Yujia and I (we usually taught together) often started 5 minutes early so that each student to give a brief introduction of themselves. These introductions helped warm the class up so that they would be more comfortable and responsive for the remainder of the class.

The first class I taught (I taught alone that class), was utterly terrible, in my opinion. I was super awkward and I was just reading off of my powerpoint. It was really boring and it didn’t get the students involved. After this, I had to figure out how to make my presentation more interesting.

My teammate, Yujia, helped me to revise my whole powerpoint. We cut down on videos and came up with little activities that would get the class involved. These activities were usually spelling games. Instead of just reading off the powerpoint, we came up with questions to ask the class. These questions would usually lead to mini-lessons. For example, if we were on a Trump slide, we would tell the class that Trump is a Republican. Then, we would ask if anyone knew what the other major political party in America is. It was unlikely that the students knew what a “Democrat” was, so we would teach them the word “Democrat”.

We eventually created a game, “Which side is American?”. We would have two different halves of a slide, right or left, and one side would consist of something American and the other side would usually consist of something Chinese. It would look like this:

From the slide above, we were able to teach the word “crowded” (and we were not trying to make fun of China’s beaches).

After all of these revisions, the quality of the lesson increased by a tenfold. I can easily say that some of the classes we taught were a success. What made our lesson a success was that it was educational, interactive, and most importantly, fun. We weren’t teaching them with the purpose of educating them, but to make English fun to learn about. Looking back, my American culture lesson was basically an interactive vocabulary lesson.

As I mentioned earlier, we were originally planning to teach art instead of music and dance. Suddenly, one day, it struck to Yujia and me that our current lesson on art was boring. Since we’ve always wanted to teach music, we decided to teach music instead. Dance is often associated with music, so we decided to teach dance too. We spent about two days creating the music/dance lesson and a few days later, we taught it. We ended up teaching music/dance only twice, but both classes were super “lit”. 

The ELA team also taught music, but both teams planned accordingly so that no class would be taught two music lessons.