Reflection – Fruits (Revision)

My last MCT and MST observation were on November 7th of 2018. I grabbed this opportunity to

revise the lesson I taught the previous day and also apply my MCT recommendations. After I

covered the attendance and morning songs, I told the students then we’ll be reading a new and fun

story today called “Handa’s surprise” by Eileen Browne. I began by showing them the cover page

and asking them “What can you see?”, “What is the girl carrying?” while trying to carry the fruits

basket above my head, and “Do you know the names of these fruits?” hoping they can remember

the difficult names that I previously taught them.

I moved on to introducing the story; “This is Handa and she has a surprise for her friends, shall we

listen to the story and find out what the surprise is?” and began when I knew that I’ve grabbed

their full attention. Later on, I shifted to playing the memory match game by placing the fruits

flashcards upside down and choosing students who are sitting nicely to come up and play, students

will repeat after the teacher individually then as a whole group. By now students understood the

concept of the game compared to the first time I played with them and they know the rules without

me having to constantly repeat them. Students know that only the ones who are sitting nicely will

get picked to turn the card and share it with their fellow classmates. During Circle time I would

use Vygotsky’s theory on the more knowledgeable other (Vygotsky, L., 1980). If the student was

struggling to remember the place and name of the fruit, I would call out a Higher-level (HL) student

and ask them to lend a helping hand. The HL student can give them a hint or explain it in Arabic

but without giving them the answers.

For the activities, I tried to make it more hands-on where I allowed the students to name, feel, and

smell the fruits and describe it to the teacher or Ms. Hamda (MST). Furthermore, I placed white

paper along with small fruit pictures and asked students to draw their favorite fruits from the story

while roaming around and asking them to talk about what they drew. Lastly, I placed a few opened

fruits at the discovery center and allow students to look at it through the magnifying glass. For the

last activity, I didn’t think it entirely through and feel that if I told them not to touch or lick the

fruits before distributing them would be safer. For the closing, I initially planned to place the fruits

in front of me while showing them a certain animal and asking them which fruit was taken but

decided to change it last minute. Instead, I had the students come up with their drawing and share

it with the rest of the class. I was quite amazed at how students preferred to draw fruits such as

Guava, Pineapple, and Avocado and were able to independently name them and describe the size

and color.