Working With Young Learners

This was the third week and the third lesson for this course. This time, Pn. Foziah had used Constructivist approach to teach my class, whereby we were told to construct our own learning with the guidance of lecturer as a facilitator. Well, today’s lesson started with a short introduction by our beloved lecturer. After that, we were asked to form into seven groups, whereby each group was given a subtopic, based on the main topic of ‘Working with Young Learners’. This was introduced to my class because we would be future-teachers, and sooner or later, we would have to deal with children in classroom. So, this topic was actually a preparation given by Pn. Foziah to build our foundation. Hence, every lesson in this course was really vital in shaping our lives in becoming good, creative and innovative teachers in future.

Thus, the task for today was to discuss the topic given, explain explain it in a powerpoint show and then present the knowledge that we knew to the class. Each group was given one hour to do the task and members were each assigned with different roles. For example, for my group, my leader had assigned three of my friends to find the information on the internet after our discussion, while one would type out the powerpoint slides and another became the helper of the typer and lastly, the leader guided and controlled the situation to make sure that everything was organized and in their place.

Through this type of group works, I felt that I could learn better. During the discussion with my member about the subtopic, ‘1.3: Children’s Capacity in Indirect Learning’, I could feel the bondage between my members and I while we were doing our work. I learnt that in a group discussion, team work and cooperation were very important. With good team work, we were able to produce a good piece of presentation. This of course came with a rule, whereby no member should be a passenger as it would delay the progress of work. But this did not happen in my group as everyone was eager to participate and excited in making the slides presentation a successful one.

Through my presentation, I had learnt that there were many methods in conducting indirect learning. My group had presented this subtopic based on 3 questions, which were ‘Why children need to have indirect learning?’, ‘What are the types of indirect learning activities?’ and lastly, ‘How children indulge into indirect learning?’. Based on these questions, we came to know that children love and learn better through guessing game like Charade, Hangman, Blind Game and also not to forget, language games like Broken telephone, Scrabble, Crossword Puzzles and many more exciting activities. As a future teacher, I had to know the existence of indirect learning so as to be able to promote students’ learning and also to bring them into independent learning through discussion and full involvement in throughout the activities or lessons.

Today I had learnt not only from my group but as well on other group’s presentation. Through presentations, I was able to absorb more information into my brain through the main points being pointed out by my friends from other groups. Besides that, we had feedbacks from the listener on how well we did our part. Their feedbacks showed on how well they had grasped on what we had been presenting.

Hence, all in all, this lesson was a meaningful one as it taught me things that I should have known as a future teacher. The feedbacks given also helped me to improve on my presentation and skills in becoming a good, systematic leader in future. So, I am here looking forward to the next class. That was all for today.