10 lessons of Finnish by a trainee

Aims

To reinforce the knowledge about writing sentences. Tp pay attention to the content of the sentence. Where does the sentence finish and the new one start?

• To study different types of texts, facts and fiction
• How do we define a sentence?
• Describing an object by writing sentences.
• Making riddles.
• Writing texts for pictures.
• Writing questions.
• Writing an e-mail using different types of sentences.

Challenges for the trainee

How can I add thinking skills? How can I plan my tasks so that they give more room for thinking?

What material can I use?

At first the trainee produced some authentic material of her own when she brought extracts of different types of texts. The pupils sorted the texts into groups. This was done in small groups. She wanted the pupils to do the work by themselves from the beginning. The grouping was discussed together.

The trainee brought sentences which she had cut into singular words. The pupils had to form sentences. This was group work. It was challenging for the pupils even if they could see the words that had a capital letter and the words that ended with ., ! or ?.

The pupils had brought objects from home. They were put on one table. Everybody chose one object and wrote at least three sentences about it. The sentences were read out loud so that the class had to guess which object had been described. Reading out loud one sentence led into guessing but reading out loud 2-3 sentences started the pupils thinking more. This  reading went on for a long time. One pupil:" Don't ask Sonja. She knows the answer and we want to think about a bit longer!" Some reflection took place because the trainee tried to find out the  features of an object which helped them to find the right object. The features were used when the pupils tried to ask who is the friend of the teacher (one of the pupils). The trainee was trying to develop the steps.

The trainee brought a worksheet with 3 pictures on. The task was to write three sentences about each picture. There were no limitations. Their homework was to write three questions about each picture.

The questions were read out loud. The teacher added challenge and asked the pupils to write down two more sentences about each picture and this time the picture should not give an answer.

The trainee did a lot of things differently than she normally does. She limited the use of the material and bravely used a lot more time on the tasks. She also took some steps in reflection and didn't really teach the pupils in the traditional way. She was very open to new ideas and said that the changing her own idea of teaching is challenging when she started planning her lessons from the thinking point of view. I had talked to the trainees for 1 hour about the project. We talked about the thinking aspect before and after every lesson.

Next step

The questions were so interesting that they could be sorted if we wanted to study the content of them. Next trainee will teach the pupils about writing lines. We could use the questions to help us create a story where lines are needed. There were two children on the pictures the trainee used.