My classroom

My classroom

Welcome to my virtual classroom. Here I meet my students every week and we do our best to polish up their English.

The picture below shows one of the classrooms from my linguistic school. The others are similar but there are few differences.

I'll start with  a description of the room you can see above, classroom no. five. There is a big, rectangular table in the middle. There are six chairs for students (mi biggest group is of six, my smallest of four) and one for the teacher. The chairs are the same now, but they used to be plastic for students two month ago. I'm very pleased that my superiors took care of buying more comfortable chairs for my students as I know it was an issue for some of them. I also find it reasonable that both me and students have the same type of chair as I don't feel I should have any better conditions than them.

In the room there are few posters as you can see. They present pictures of Spain, I don't know why but I suppose it might have been a Spanish room once. There is a cork board on the right, you can see drawings hanged, for example Christmas trees from December. There is also interactive board with special pens, but they don't work now unfortunately. Nevertheless, I use the computer and projector instead of usual white board I just write the topic and notes in a Word document. It's very easy way to write, I don't use any markers or sponges and the students immediately see what I write and have no problem with my handwriting. In the other classrooms there are whiteboards and screens but I've already learned how to manage both options.

Therefore, massive flaw of using the screen as a whiteboard is that we need to switch off one of the lights to see the screen well. Sometimes we even turn it off completely when we watch something or look at some pictures. That makes is impossible for students to write in their notebooks or books at the same time. I need to take it under consideration while planning the lesson and knowing we'll study in this room. Moreover, my students as any other human being are in a sleepy mood after the whole day at school, and if they come to extra classes in a dark room, sitting in a soft chair it's no surprise they just want to sleep. I had enough situations like this to remember not to turn off the lights for more than few minutes and to keep the students as active as possible at that time.

With younger students, third graders, the board and electronically pens are quite problematic. They are interested in their functions and the exact reason why we don't use them. It often happens that one of the boys suddenly stands up and tries to activate the pen without my permission.

To give you whole picture, there are three windows in the room and one fan so it's ready to keep us comfortable any time of the year. We also have hangers so that students have their coats with them all the time and don't need to worry about that, they just left it in the classroom and take them after the lesson. I as a teacher also leave my coat there as I have three lessons in a row in the same room.

With such a small groups of students I enjoy working in the classroom you can see on the picture. The table like in a conference room is well situated for me and my students and it's big enough for them not to bother one another. Plus the room's size is big enough to make the learning- teaching process comfortable. I'm able to come to every student and check their work, every student is free to go to the bathroom if he or she needs to. Colors and interior of the school is pleasing and calm. Orange is the color of the school and you can see it in every room. I like it, it makes the impression of coherent space. If it was my school maybe I would establish some changes but not much.