By

Agnestasia Melinda
Alessandro
Fany Sri Lestari
Shavira Sarashita

*Students enrolled in TESOL concentration

Vira, Agnes, Ales & Fanny
Vira, Agnes, Ales & Fanny

We, Agnes, Aless, Fany, and Vira,  did our teaching in the community called TrotoArt located in North Jakarta. We were accompanied by Ma’am Melanie and Ma’am Ienneke to go to the location on 30th of November 2014. We had two sessions, each of which took us one hour to finish teaching. We taught students who were between 5 to 9 years of age in the first session while in the second session, we taught  12 years old students. Each class consisted of approximately 25 students. It appeared that the plan we made did not go as we thought it would. We altogether taught the students, but only two of us  were leading  at a time.

In the first session, we taught vocabulary about body parts. The students were so active that it was initially quite difficult for us to fully control the environment of the class. It appeared to be great and exciting for the four of us since the class situation became alive. Whenever we talked to them or asked them questions, they were so enthusiastic to answer. However, there were also some situations that made us felt confused of what we were going to do. For example, when there was a student tried to cheat when she was doing her exercise, the other students suddenly shouted at her by saying, “Kak, kak, look! She’s cheating! She’s cheating!” Seeing this kind of situation, we tried to make students calm down and continue their work. Minutes after minutes, we, as the teachers, were able to manage the class better. Since it seemed nearly impossible for us to totally stick to the plan, an alteration in the plan was made by the ideas we came up with.

For the presentation, we planned to introduce the students parts of the body, but it turned out that the students had learned about it. Therefore, we decided to review the parts that they had known. Luckily, there were some parts of the body that they had not learned before, so we added some new vocabularies of body parts to the students. After that, we continued to the practice session, when the students had to play a game related to the topic. The game went remarkably well since the students followed it excitedly. The next part of the lesson was the production, when the students were given handouts to work in pairs. They did it extremely quick. We can tell that the practice and the production session went on really well because it was exactly like what we had planned and expected. Unconsciously, the time was up and the closing was just gone since we were honestly a bit panic. As a result, we just said that the lesson was over and said goodbye and thanked the students. No sooner did the first session finish than the second one started.

Students of TrotoArt, Penjaringan
Students of TrotoArt, Penjaringan

In the second session, the main concern was about action verbs. The level of the students in this session was from the 5th grade of Elementary School until Junior High School. The students of this session were as enthusiastic as the previous-session students. The lesson started with the introduction part which went on really well. It then continued with the presentation session where we, as the teachers, used an eliciting method to generate the students’ ideas and vocabularies about action verbs that they had in their mind. We could tell that it worked remarkably well since we got so many action verbs to learn. The students really paid attention and followed the lesson excitedly. By eliciting, the students knowledge were explored since some of them seemed trying to guess the words when one of us demonstrated the movement of the verbs.

Us and the TrotoArt team
Us and the TrotoArt team

After the presentation went on pretty well, we moved on to the practice part. In this part of lesson, we told the students to move all their tables aside and make a circle. We played a game called ‘Agnes says…’, where the students had to demonstrate the movements of the verbs that Agnes said. If one of us said, “Agnes says ‘Jump!’”, then the students  jumped. However, when one of us said, says  ‘Jump!’”, the students must not jump. At the end of the game, we got four students who made mistakes in the game so that we asked them to just mention two verbs that they knew and demonstrated it in front of their peers. Moving on to the production session, we distributed the handouts for them to work in pairs. Surprisingly, they did the exercise really quickly. Shortly after, we discuss the answer together by having the students coming forward one by one to write their answers on the blackboard. After the lesson had finished, we closed it by concluding and saying thank you and good bye. Before they went home, we took pictures together with Ma’am Melanie, Ma’am Ienneke, and the owner of the TrotoArt community as well.

Session Opening
Session Opening

All in all, the four of us may conclude that this experience is valuable and unforgettable since it gives us lessons as well. All the theories that we have learned in the classroom were apparently needed to be applied in the classroom. Moreover, we finally can meet the real feeling while teaching the young learners directly. We hope that we might improve and enhance our skills in teaching methodology, class management, and many more. Lastly, we would like to say thank you very much to the lecturers that have told us so many useful and true theories, stories, experiences, and facts about everything happening in the classroom.