First Lesson

In the second week of the semester, I taught my first lesson for student teaching to a middle school beginners’ class that I worked with during practicum. It was the first lesson in unit about “tastes and colors”; a unit in which students will learn the names of articles of clothing, the last two subject pronouns “nous” and “on”, possessive adjectives, and the verbs “mettre” and “pouvoir”. They will also be reviewing colors and learned how to make them agree with the genders of the nouns (for example articles of clothing) they describe.
The purpose of this lesson was to review colors. The previous unit was about modes of transportation, so I brought in a model of a car rapide that my wife had made out of a cardboard box for her Halloween costume. A car rapide is a local bus that is painted many bright colors and has religious sayings written all over it. It is a form of public transportation provided by the Muslim brotherhoods. I also put ten different colored pencils on the students’ desks.
To begin the lesson, I covered the model car rapide with bed sheet and wrote a riddle on the board, offering clues as to what could be under the sheet. When someone finally guessed what it was, I asked the students to name some of the colors that the bus was painted. As they named the colors, I made a on the board. I then asked the students to hold up the colored pencil that corresponded with the color that I called aloud. The students then opened their binder to their vocsbulary list from the previous unit, which consisted of black and white images of different modes of transportation. I then started to say things like “I want to see a green car, a yellow taxi, and a red boat.” I walked around to make sure they were coloring in the pictures with the correct colors and then ended the class with a discussion about how to make the colors agree with the noun. For example, I would ask them if the word for car was masculine or feminine and then ask them what they needed to do in order to make the color agree with the gender of the noun. We eventually ran out of time.
I think the lesson went pretty well. I used the vocabulary from the previous unit to introduce the topic and acted as more of a facilitator when it came to generating the list of vocabulary terms and explaining how to make the colors agree with the noun they supply. My favorite part was the intro with the car rapide. I only fear that I will not always be able to come up with fun and creative ideas.