Model Answer Unit 5, Activity 10 C, Application and Reflection
This is a model answer. Your reflective account might be different.
This week, as we near Christmas, we planned a festive Spanish lesson using six words associated with Christmas as the base of learning. We have found six words to be adequate for our resident group due to their cognitive abilities. If we did this lesson again, I would find a visual representation of these harder words rather than relying on the written words on the white board.
After we learned our words and pronounced them together, we moved on to an exercise where we could consolidate previous learning. For this, we used Christmas pictures but asked questions about colours, numbers and animals to aid recall of previous lessons. Many of the learners found this tricky at first, remembering early lesson words better than the previous weeks... This may have been associated with an interrupted lesson as another resident kept entering the session or the vocabulary being trickier and not so easily associated with actions or similar words.
We then made Christmas cards, using card the colour of the Spanish flag and cut out colouring templates with Christmas wishes in Spanish. Learners were again encouraged to recall the colours and all identified that the colours offered were that of the Spanish flag. We had found that one lady finds colouring difficult if using pencils or crayons as she lacks strength at times in her dominant arm, but we gave her felt pens and with a lot of encouragement and she did well. Once again, it was helpful to have two leaders present to talk and aid! Using pictorial aids always generates conversations whether this be when colouring templates or looking at magazine or online pictures.
Our final activity was to sing 'Feliz Navidad' and residents were given the words to this.
Throughout the session we discussed Spanish Christmas Culture and how this differed from our Christmas culture. We had laid out wine and chocolates since it was a festive special, food always seems to encourage learners’ attendance!
As we have a very busy schedule over Christmas in the home, we plan to have a short break but will verbally check in on learners and provide a vocabulary book to each learner. We plan to meet up in the New Year with a revision class and then move on to food.
I am continually amazed at how with a little encouragement, learners are remembering words they feel like they do not know. Residents astound me with their ways of remembering words and likewise, we have come up with some interesting visual pictures or actions to remember words. Residents appear to enjoy our Spanish lessons and the banter that goes with them goes hand in hand with the opportunity for them to
learn new skills and as one resident said 'give my brain a workout'. We would never conduct a lesson without a smart phone or tablet now as residents often lead us into looking up new words or looking up something they recall in a memory. This keeps us all interested.
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