“Küçük hanımlar, küçük beyler! Sizler hepiniz geleceğin bir gülü, yıldızı, bir mutluluk parıltısısınız! Memleketi asıl aydınlığa boğacak sizsiniz. Kendinizin ne kadar mühim, kıymetli olduğunuzu düşünerek ona göre çalışınız. Sizlerden çok şeyler bekliyoruz."

Mustafa Kemal ATATÜRK

I liked this and wanted you to see it too because I believe we all need encouragement. It is from ATATÜRK and as you see he was very good at seeing the future clearly at those old days. Whenever I read these lines,my heart turns out to be full of encouragement, hope,peace, and happiness. What about you? I am only curious about which feelings these lines leave on your hearts once you read them. Let's share them...

HOW IS EVERYTHING GOING NOWADAYS?

Hi EVERYBODY, How is everything going in your life nowadays? I think most of us were relaxed last week when assessed teaching issue was completely over and we took a deep breath. Also, there are not many lessons that you have to study, which is really good for our mental health in my opinion:) Applications to private institutions are over for me and I do not want to deal with anything related to preparations for meetings, lesson demonstrations, etc. (I am really fed up with them:( Now I am very fine and I believe I need a peaceful life for the rest of my life:) As you see I am a bit tired, what about you? what are you doing? I wish good luck and a peaceful life for you in your future life...

TED- ELT CONFERENCE

Hi everybody, Let me tell you that there is an ELT Conference at TED Ankara on 24th May, 2008. It is not free as it had been at Atılım University so you should spare 30 YTL for such a conference. I wanted to attend, but on this day I have a drama course. I suggest that you should do your best to be there because all the speakers are foreigners and you may get lots of things from them. If you are interested in it, you can visit the website and here you are http://www.tedankara.k12.tr/ I will keep informing you on such occasions:))

A FAREWELL TO OUR LITTLE STUDENTS AND DEAR MENTOR TEACHER

Unfortunately today was the last day of our practice teaching adventure:(( We did our teachings and at the end of the lessons took photos with our students and mentor teacher. All the students were very kind to us. We really liked them throughout the term. I believe that I am very lucky to be together with them and have such a dear mentor teacher like ours. In the end our mentor teacher gave a detailed feedback to us and we gave her a present. She was very kind and concerned with our teachings, problems, etc. She was very friendly and sincere while talking to us in the school. In short, everything went without a problem and we were happy to be there...

So my dear friends what about your farewells?

ASSESSING... ALL THE TIME ASSESSING SOMETHING...:((

Hi friends,

Today ı have done my assessed teaching. I did not like my performance in the class. I think I made a mistake in deciding on the difficulty level of the reading text. My mentor teacher said it was really difficult on the part of the students as they are both young learners and at elementary level of English competency. In my previous teachings I had never made such a mistake- as my mentor teacher said. Nevertheless I believe that every failure will add valuable experiences in my competency.

I wish good luck for my friends who haven't done his/her teaching yet...

READING SKILL WITH A GRAMMAR POINT

Incorporating different skills into the lessons is really important because reaching as many students as possible is our aim. In this ways, we have the chance to encourage our students to participate in the activities. To make grammatical points be internalized on the part of the students, we can benefit from reading skill a lot. What can we do with a reading activity? we should choose a meaningful passage covering the target structure and the function. Your text may include different people's plans in the future. While making the students read the text, we may include a pronunciation game (it is like a game in which one of the student starts to read the text and if s/he makes a pronunciation error, then the turn will be given to the next student). After all the students take part in reading the text, you can ask some questions related to the passage in the target structure like "what is Sandra going to do?" Also, you may provide your students with a task in which the ss are provided with some kinds of plans taken from the text and asked to find out the person whose plan given there. At the last stage there should be some comprehension questions so as to give the ss the chance to produce sentences in the target structure.

SO ı like reading very much and ı will make use of this skill a lot in my future lessons because ı want my students read a lot in their daily lives. I believe that most of the students will get bored, but if we enrich reading time with different materials the ss will gradually have fun. What do you think about this skill? What can be done with listening for sake of making reading an enjoyable task? ı am waiting for your creativity:D

CONDUCTING AN EXPLICIT TEACHING... the steps...

let's choose "going to future" as the grammar point.

• provide lots of communicative exercises, activities, different kinds of multi sensory materials,
• gradually come to the point of teaching the grammatical aspect explicitly, but how can you do this?
• you may provide your students with an info-gap activity and expect them to ask questions to each other and give answers of them,
• after such a speaking activity, you may tell them to make dialogues making use of the previous information,
• you should write the dialogues on the board and underline the target structure after the ss produce them,
• after making dialogues ask the ss to form sentences with the structure and again write them on the board,
• if they give a sentence starting with "she or he", then ask them to reform the sentence with "they"
• then, ask them such a question: "which tense is this? what can you say about it?" here the ss are expected to talk about "plans, future, etc."
• the other question should be related to the form. you can ask, "what about the form? how can you make up sentences with this tense?"

as you see, you can complete such a part in this way.after completing explicit teaching you can enrich your lesson with a speaking activity.

so what do you think? does it make sense to you? if you have suggestions, ı will be pleased to read all of them:D