Phew! I confess, it is hard teaching when you are clueless yourself. But I like this feeling, when you are constantly on your feet and never seem to be comfortable. It pushes you to be the best. I'm willing to learn, explore and maybe try something new myself. I'm going to try to blog every weekend on my journey in KSSR year one. It might come handy upon reflection.

The first week: All about sounds! It involves every sound you can imagine, environmental and verbal. For a start, I am not going to divert much from the textbook. The contents will be the same, but the way the lesson is structured will be of my own.

Highlighted: The Learning Standards chosen

Listening and speaking.

The sounds involved are cow's, bee's, monkey's, dog's, snake's, hummingbird's and woodpecker's. I showed them the pictures and make the sound. They repeated it several times with actions. For enrichment activity, the pupils were asked to circle the picture when they hear a particular sound being made. In addition, I also included sounds around the school. We placed our ears to the wall and eavesdropped! They love it!!



Reading


This was where the headache came in last week. Year one, week one, Reading???? I flipped through the learning standards, luckily it involves identifying roman letters and shapes. So....I decided to write several writing (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Jawi, Bahasa Melayu and English) on the board and let them chose which one is English (lets not undermine their pre-requisite knowledge shall we?). As expected, they can. So the lesson went on to introduce the direction of writing, we did 'tai chi' to show left and right. I made up the moves, obviously. Then I went on to show the size of the letters, which were small and capital letters. During this stage, all I want them to understand was that there were two sizes involved, small and capital. We did some action on that too. To demonstrate further, I showed them letter cards to compare the sizes of the letters and also directed them to some authentic material in the classroom. The clue in identifying small and capital letter in a group is the size. I know there are loads of tricks to this but for enrichment activity, I asked them to colour blue for small letters (they can see it small, its obvious) and red for capital letter. The worksheet below was cut in 3x3 and distributed to all. I just do it this way to save some papers.




Writing

It's 'tai chi' time again, and it seemed to me that they enjoyed it. Anyway, we did some lines on the board. zig zag, straight, loop (clockwise and anti-clockwise). It's a lot, I know but I need to go a little fast on this. To start off the writing class, I did posture check, pencil holding ability and their working area, boy! it has been a while since I last taught year one and I find it rather tiring to pin point every small aspect. The lesson went smoothly, and we did some tracing in the book. We carried the activity to the next day, and many were able to complete. I find their motor skills are okay, flexible enough. Let's just hope when the actual writing occur, they will be as ready as this.

Language Arts


We danced and sang to the tunes of the wheels on the bus, the lyrics changed of course. It incorporated the sound that we heard on the first day. Some actions and singing were done. The initials to the sounds were introduced and as the objectives, I only required 3 creative sounds out of 4 being taught, so the objectives were achieved! Yeay! My only regret is I think many in the weaker class didn't appreciate the activity. I must improvise more to get them engaged. As usual, enrichment activity, matching the initials to the animals. I helped them by mimicking the sound as they went through the exercises.




That's all. I'm tired of typing. Maybe next time I would just vlog.