First Week of Teaching Practice

The first week spent at Haderslev Kristnefriskole was about watching, observing and getting to know each other.
We have seen English classes in the 3rd, 4rth, 5th, 8th and 9th grade.

What surprised us in:

• The Third Class:nearly all class was taught in English and pupils could understand the instructions without difficulties. Else used a lot of gestures and mimics to intensify what she was saying. All the activities were playfull and very funny and children enjoyed them thoroughly. Else uses a lot of songs, chants, poems and games to make children engaged in the class.
• The Fourth Class: It was very similar to the Third Class. Else also uses games, chants and songs when teaching English to this class. Moreover, the pupils are used to working on computers during the class. They use webpage www.manythings.org with plenty of games and excercises focused on English grammar, vocabulary, spelling and listening. It was quite shocking for me that each child has got a notebook. It is quite unusual in the Czech Republic.
• The Fifth Class: This class is taught by Rebekka, who is not a qualified English Teacher. She does not use English a lot when she talks to her pupils, although her level of English is pretty good. The majority of the lesson is in Danish. She does not use a lot of warm-up activities and there was also no summary in the end. Therefore her classes were not very beneficial for me.
• The Eight Class: Else is really great with small children but she seems to me a bit hopeless with teenage pupils. She is extremely kind but when teaching English to older pupils, she should me more strict and energetic. I also suggest that she use more activities to make pupils busy. When they are busy with taks they have no time to be naughty and loud.
• The Ninth Class: Surprisingly, there are only girls in this class. The ninth class is supposed to take a major English exam. Therefore, the classes we saw were focused on practising for the exam.
  

To sum up: I really like Else's teaching style when she teaches English to children. She knows a range of different activities to make her classes interesting and funny for children. However, when it comes to teaching teenagers, she is not energetic enough to make pupils work properly.
Rebekka is a nice teacher too, but she should use English more in her classes. When 80 % of a class is in Danish, you cannot call it an English lesson.

Week 12

Music on Monday was great as usual. We listened to a classical song and then we were supposed to act and say what we think the music says. It was a great activity which could be easily used in classes. We also sang "Singing All Together", which is probably the anthem of this Erasmus Stay. I was playing the piano and other students were singing and it was really a wonderful feeling. I continued playing at home, too. We are so lucky that we have a piano at home!

The last lesson of Special Needs was interesting, too. Bodil was talking about dyslexia and then we presented our presentations about special education. All those presentations were carefully prepared and therefore not boring. Sometimes presentations are really bothering, too long, there are no pictures, videos and so on. But in this class all the presentations were very interesting. I specially liked the Polish one.

On Wednesday we had the last lesson of Globalisation and Citizenship and then we went shopping to get the ingredients necessary for cooking lesson on Thursday.

Cooking on Thursday was really funny and the result was simply delicious. We had potatoe-and-leek soup, lasagne stuffed with vegetables, salad with beet root, carrot, apple and onion and apple cake. And we also tried Røgrød med fløde(I had to google the name:)), which are all red berries you find with cream. Really delicious. I`m really looking forward to trying some recipies at home!

The only stupid thing was that some Danish students didn`t feel like talking in English. But at least some of them did.

On Thursday, me, Ania and Loes were also interviewed by a journalist about how we like the stay here, why we chose Denmark, what is different and surprising and so on. He also took some photos of us so maybe we`ll be on the cover of a magazine.:))

Tuesday 9th, the best day

On Tuesday 9th we had a wonderful physical education class. I think that we all thoroughly enjoyed it as Jakob is probably the best teacher we've had here so far. We played a great number of enjoyable games from different countries. We also sang some national songs and everything was great. After P.E. we had a break for lunch and then Special Needs with Bodil. Although we didn't learn much new in this lesson, I quite liked it as Bodil is a nice teacher and she allowed us to discuss the key points she talked about.
After school we prepared a wonderful lunch - tortillas stuffed with meat and Mexican beans with sunnyside-up eggs and Chinese leaves. Without a doubt, Katka is the best cook in Denmark!
You can see the picture of our lunch and of me typing posts for my webblog.

Week 8 and 9 in Denmark

On Friday 26th there was a costume party at school and I thoroughly enjoyed it! It was a bit complicated to get a costume here but finally I made it and disguised as a devil. We danced until the dawn and I went to bed at 3 A.M.
We had a rest at the weekend and I visited Belgian girls in their residence and I had a delicious dinner there.
In Week Nr. 9 we didn't have any special subjects. We were really disappointed by the optional English lesson as it was not focused on conversation, grammar or vocabulary, as we had expected, but on analysing a poem. Therefore, we decided not to attend this course any more.
Moreover, we had Special Needs but we didn't learn anything new in this lesson.
On Thursday we day a delicious lunch in the canteen. What's more, it was for free! Great.

God bless Music and Physical Education

I must say that this week I've enjoyed Music and Physical Education most. Both of these subjects were carefully prepeared, included a lot of motivation and we were really active and had no chance to get bored.
Although I'm not much into sport, I thoroughly enjoyed P.E., because Jakob - our teacher - prepared a great number of interesting games for us and he himself was really friendly and nice.
I was also keen on the music lesson as we learned one great song in English and learned some tricks how to use music in other classes. Also the music teacher Else was great and I'm looking forward to seeing her again.
What I did not enjoy at all was the Danish lesson. Our teacher probably wants us to learn a lot of phrases - but the problem is that we still do not know how to pronounce them and she repeats everything twice at most. She also wants us to read dialogues, although we are hopeless at reading in Danish. Less would be more in this case, some basic phrases would be perfectly sufficient for our purposes... I'm really getting under pressure during her lessons as I do not know how to pronounce anything and I'm feeling really stupid.
I quite liked the first part of Comparative Education with Tove Heidemann, as the first part of it was focused on social psychology. In the second part she wanted to tell us something about encyclopaedic approach in teaching. However, the information she was telling us were about 10 years old and the current situation is totally different. Moreover, Tove said she is not a teacher ad you can recognize it very easily as she wasn't able to answer some of our simple questions concerning education in Denmark...
I quite liked Globalisation and citizenship with Torbjorn as we discussed a lot. But 3 hours are too much, although there were some breaks. I also didn't like the idea, that after 45 minutes he let us go for lunch for 45 minutes and then we were to continue in studying. When you have lunch at home you are not feeling like going to school again. In my opinion, it's better to skip breaks and finish earlier than to have 3-4 breaks during the lesson.
Jorn Buch is a real historian - he's keen on everything he's telling us but we are not keen on it at all. Although he should tell us something about Danish history, he spends the most of the lesson telling us some information about Germany.

Friday Night Fever

On Friday 12th we didn't stay long at school. We just discussed what we'd experienced so far and evalauated the lessons we'd had. I was quite to surprised to see that Jete is open to criticism. She took down some notes and I'm pretty convinced that she'll do her best to improve the things in the programme we weren't satisfied with. Than we planned our trip to Copenhagen.
After school we, Katka and Vojta went to a pizza restaurant. Then we bought some beer and went to Vojta's place. In the evening we went to Student's Cafe and had a really good time there. We were drank beer, danced, talked a lot and went to bed at 3.30 A.M.:-)) You can see some photos....

Danish, Aesthetic learning processes, Globalisation and citizenship

First of all, I would like to say that here in Denmark there is a big difference in how each class is done. Some of them are lecture-like (Aesthetic learning processes, Globalisation and citizenship), some require our activity. I have to say that I prefer the latter because it's virtually impossible to pay attention to what teacher is saying for three hours, although there are some breaks.
Our Danish teacher tries to make her classes active - we worked in pairs, made circles and practised the Danish phrases, and played a game with a ball. It was all quite fine. But a big problem is that we do not know how to pronounce the phrases correctly. We repeat after the teacher, but the class is too big and I cannot hear her properly. We also repeat just twice, which is not enough. She also said that some activites we do are boring. In my opinion the teacher should never say anything like this because the moment he/she says it, the pupils lose their attention because they do not want to do anything that is boring. I also wish we learned some basic phrases like Good Morning, Thank you, etc... Because when I come to a supermarket, I really do not know what to say.

Aesthetic learning processes had a very promising begining. We played some ice-breaker games and we really got the right mood for studying. However, after the wonderful beggining an extremely boring lecture began. I don't even know how the matter of the lecture could be used in a classroom. If we had done only some useful games and activities like in the first part of the lesson, it would have been much better.

The first part of Globalisation and citizenship was also like a lecture. We learned why it is important to learn about citizenship. Then we worked in groups. We were given a sheet of paper with thoughts of different historians, philosophers and scholars. Our task was to discuss these ideas in groups and choose 3 statements we like and give some arguments and find 1 that we do not agree with. It was quite a good activity but the ideas were really complicated, written in very advanced English and I think that they weren't understandable for everybody. It was difficult even for me, although I study English. But the teacher was very nice and I quite liked this class.

I'm also getting used to Iben Jensen's teaching style. She's a little bit crazy (in a good way), funny and energetic. When she enters the class she's like a huricane and everybody has to pay attention to what she's saying. This time we discussed how to start classes and how to motivate students and we also worked in groups of 3 people and talked about different pictures and tried to find how they could be used at school.

Language and Identity & History

On Tuesday 9th we had Language and Indentity and History seminars. The aim of the first one was to make us aware of our perceiving languages. We drew our language portrait (we placed foreing languages into a picture of a human body and had to explain why we placed them like that). Then we worked in groups and discussed how different nations understand the meaning of different colours. We found out that for some people black colour is a symbol of death and darkness, for some it might be a positive colour. On the other hand, whereas white colour represents wedding and happiness, for someone it's a picture of the death. Also pink colour is perceived differently - some people love it, some cannot stand it. I enjoyed this seminar a lot. The only problem was that the teacher spoke too much, but she prepared her lesson carefully and we did a great number of different activities, such as drawing, creating a poem, reading, discussing, etc.
The History lesson was focused on some key events from Danish history and on the fact that European countries have a lot in common. Unfortunately, this lesson was a bit boring, although the teacher is very nice. In the end, the teacher livened it up because he asked us to sing our national anthems. So we did it and it was fun.

Studying in Denmarkfor more than a week I'm feeling that some teachers here make basic pedagogical mistakes - they speak too much, speak while they are facing the whiteboard and often aren't willing to lead a dialogue with students. They also do not use activating methods and there lessons seem to be scarcely prepared. They just enter the room, play a film or speak and speak and then go away. They do not want students to be active. Their aim seems to be just kill time they have for the class.

Storytellers - Danish literature and film

We had 2 seminars of this name - one on Friday 5th, one on Monday 8th. The first one was dedicated to Karen Blixen - a prominent Danish writer. We watched a documentary film on her life. Moreover, there is quite a famous film about her which is called "Out of Africa" with Meryl Strepp and Robert Redford starring. The film was interesting but too long and it was quite difficult to concentrate on it. In the second part of this lesson we divided into groups and prepared presentations which were supposed to introduce our country to others but we had to include a story in it.

On Monday we presented our presentations to other students. Some presentations were very well prepared but some students presented factual information, not a story. Our Czech group decided to tell others o tale of the Astronomical Clock in Prague. We used some extracts from "Goat Movie" and our presentation was quite successful.
It's interesting how different nations presented their countries in many different ways.

Spanish girls used just music, pictures and text and didn't say a word. Turkish girls had a nice presentation but they didn't know what some of pictures used in the presentation depict and their speech was sometimes a bit chaotic.
On Monday we also talked about Hans Christian Andersen and watched a film about his life. The film wasn't bad but it was too long - more than 3 hours. It would have been definitely a better idea if we had watched it at home. Watching films is not a really good idea because students got bored after a while and they do not pay attention!

Teaching Practice

On Thursday we visited Kristne Friskole in Haderslev. I and Katka took part in 3 lessons - a Math lesson, a Science lesson and an English lesson. Each of them was taught by a different female teacher.
What surprised me during Math was the fact that there was an assistent present during the class. He helped the children with their tasks and also kept an eye on them so that they should pay attention to the teacher. The teacher had a microphone, because of her weak voice and I think it's a bright idea. On the other hand, there was no motivation in the first part of the lesson and also no summary and greeting in the end. When the bell rang, the teacher just went away.
The Science lesson was a way interesting - the teacher wanted to explain how water is being purified. That's why she prepared 3 experiments for kids. However, it was mainly she who was active in the lesson. Children sometimes helped her, but that was all. In the end they had to cut out some pictures and stick them into a sheet with the water ring on it.
The last lesson was the best. The teacher was extremely friendly and helpful and she spoke just in English. She told us that the children are allowed to speak in Danish, but just when they ask or explanation. Otherwise, they need to speak in English. I, Katka, Margherita and Viki became participant in the lesson because we joined the groups of children and pupils were to ask us questions. Then they presented the information they discovered. After that we sang a childish song from our country and than we listened to an English prayer sang by the teacher and her pupils.
After the practice we had a seminar in which we discussed what we had experienced. The seminar teacher told us that they DO NOT TEST CHILDREN in Denmark and the main principal is that they let children do what they like to do. Teachers are also not limited in what they teach as there is no curriculum. All of these facts were quite surprising for me and I must say that I do not like them a lot. I'm used to the Czech system of education which is rather formal.

Impressions of Our Courses

First day at school we had a kind of introductory seminar. On Tuesday we had a computer lesson and we learned how to keep a weblog and how to update it. The afternoon lesson was canceled because the teacher couldn't arrive because of the snow.
On Wednesday we had a Danish lesson and I was really loking forward to it as I wanted to learn some basic phrases. Unfortunately, this lesson was a big disappointment. Although the teacher used a good excercise as motivation (we had to guess at the meaning of Danish words which are common in other languages, too), otherwise she broke nearly all didactic rules concerning language teaching.
Although we didn't know how to pronounce phrases correctly, we had to practice them and repeat 3 phrases them in circles. No matter that everybody pronounced it differently. Moreover, she shot questions at us afterwards and wanted us to answer in a flash.
She also refused to transcribe the phrases on the blackboard so that we could pronounce them correctly and didn't even know how to write the Czech Republic and Czech.
The art lesson in the afternoon was much better. We tried to draw ourselves and we've done a lot of different techniques. We drew ourselves without looking at the paper, we measured our faces with a pencil, we also tried drawing with a white crayon. The teacher was really nice and friendly and I'm looking forward to seeing her again. You can view my self-portrait and judge how successful I was.:-)