This week I gave a little test to my level 1 English class. It was 2 pages long, mostly writing short sentences, and they had 30 minutes to complete it. I've found that it is very helpful for me to get an idea of what they've learned and what they haven't learned, and it helps them see what they need to study more. I make corrections with a red pen (I love using the red pen, it makes me feel so teacher-y) and they get the tests back so they can use them to review and study. There are always a few things I find in correcting that make me laugh!
So here are the latest finds:
In response to the question "Why is Eliza happy?" where I was looking for a reason using the word because, (Eliza is me, my middle name is Elizabeth and Erin is foreign sounding and difficult for most Malians to say) one student answered, "Eliza is happy because she is not hungry." We are in the middle of the month of fasting of Ramadan, so I am guessing that this student was NOT happy because he WAS hungry! Another student said that Eliza is happy "because the students are not boring."
We start the test with 5 dictation sentences. I read each sentence 3 times and the students have to try to write what I've said. I tell the students to try to write something, even if they don't understand the sentence they should try to write the sounds of the words I am saying. I get some really creative spelling out of this. The best 2 from this round were: "Diazman" for Jasmin. (one of the characters in our book is named Jasmin, so I used this name in one of the sentences, the letters "dia" make a "j" sound here!) and "wacte" for walked, which I thought could have earned credit if only we were using a phonics program.
We are working on past tense verbs, and I gave the base form of the verb "think" and one student put it into the past tense as "thrink" and I find that somehow funny, maybe I'm just amused by creativity. Another student put "thinked" which isn't really funny, just plain wrong.
I also got another misspelling of "chicken" this time it was "ticken." I use chicken as an example a lot when we are doing oral sentences (ie. "my favorite food is chicken") but I guess they don't see it spelled out enough.
Ahh, just a few weeks left of me teaching English before we move! I am going to miss it so much, but I think I will teach again somewhere in the future.
:)
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