My first week teaching the didactic unit!

The truth is that I am really happy and satisfied with the going on of my experience!!
I must say that during last weekend I was really nervous thinking of the way that my didactic unit would work. Nevertheless, I was really excited while creating the materials for the implementation of my unit. Maybe, first of all, because I am working with literature and I really love this topic. And secondly, because I noticed that I really enjoy designing and creating the activities (in spite of the amount of hours I have been thinking and working with it!).

The first thing I did was to think about the objectives I wanted to reach at the end of it. My first idea was a ‘Trip through Literature’; however, I needed to find something accessible for the students I was going to teach. They are young teenagers who may feel (or not) interest for literature, and who may think (or not) that English is important in their lives. To start with, I thought that the main objectives to transmit during the implementation of the didactic unit were:

- to speak about literature
- to be able to tell a story
- to value or appreciate the activity of reading
- to understand the language as a key for the own cultural identity

Afterwards, I kind of planned the six different sessions I had in order to implement the didactic unit, by establishing each day for a specific and different purpose. Moreover, each day was going to approach a different literary work that I thought that was adequate. In addition, I set up the basic competences including them through the different content I was going to teach, which was: the past continuous tense; some new vocabulary related to shops; the discourse of giving directions; and the structure of letters.
I planned some classroom rules I wanted to apply within the days I would be working with students and I made a clear and practical outline of the variety of formats and strategies I would apply in every session. Furthermore, I set up a proper and similar timing for each day, so that students could feel that we were doing something such as a project, in which each day had a clear relationship with the following one; and that lessons were organized not by chance, unless due to a specific purpose.
Finally, I decided on the different materials I was going to need and I started working on the creation of the didactic unit. Just to summarize the whole didactic unit, I was going to work with my students dealing with ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Harry Potter’.

On the very first day, I introduced my students the PROJECT we were going to deal with altogether. I brought some books into the classroom and I asked them whether they liked or not literature, and which their initial thoughts about it were. Then, I showed them an oral presentation which exposed the rules and the working that I would be implementing on those days. Afterwards, I divided them into four different TEAMS (each group would be dealing with a specific literary work) and each team would be responsible to tell and deal with that work in a deeper way.

Consequently, I gave each team summaries of the books they were going to work with, and they had to order the pieces of paper that were disorganized. In the end, we made a ‘Quiz’ altogether which stressed the main elements of each book and which gave to the whole classroom some basic ideas of the four literary works we were going study.
I finally thought that they really enjoyed it. At the beginning, I was somehow nervous and afraid of their reaction, but at the precise moment I was in the ‘stage’ of the classroom, being the teacher, I really felt comfortable and I started working on the whole things I had already prepared.

I must say I was really happy at the end, and the motivation and cooperation of the students helped me a lot!