Session 10: Reflection

I believe that one of the most difficult tasks of English teachers is to motivate students to do English writing. In the last two years, I taught P.1 students and they loved writing. However, I am teaching P.3 and P.5 students this year and I've found that they do not especially love writing. A few of them even hate writing. Encouraging them to write has become a challenging job for me. 

In this session, Paul showed us how to create story e-books on the Internet. Unexpectedly, after Paul demonstrated how to use mystorybook.com to create a story e-book, we suddenly became so attentive and quiet and created our e-book excitedly! (I admitted that I was so exhausted after an extremely busy week!) This showed that interesting tasks can attract students in class! Although Paul asked us to make simple story e-books, we all paid a lot of effort and tried our best! We all love the task so much and I think of my students immediately. I hope they will have much fun as I have had just now! 

Another website, storybird.com also reminds me of TSA writing exercise which some of my students hate a lot! I believe some teachers also have a hard time asking students to do the boring TSA writing exercise, especially for those writing tasks with four pictures. In this website, students can choose the set of pictures that they like and create their own story. They can be very creative and it is very motivating. They are not forced to write about a topic or a story which they are not interested in! My classmates and I enjoyed a lot when we were trying to create a story by ourselves. When writing becomes an interesting task, students will not be afraid of writing any more. I hope I will have a chance to share what I've learnt this session with my colleagues!