Diagnostic Class

 

Before start  planning lessons, it is important that teachers make sure about the student’s previous knowledges about some topics in the target language. A diagnostic class is always taught at the very beginning of a course, semester or  module  in order to measure students' understanding of a subject area, vocabulary or skills. During this diagnostic class, we were assigned to work in groups in order to present two different activities with two specific topics such as:

• The numbers
• The alphabet
• The personal pronouns
• Classroom objects
• The family members
• Action verbs, and some other topics.

The activities allowed us to know if the children had previous knowledges about the topics presented in the class. It was really interesting because some children already knew vocabulary about the different topics; however, they did not know the pronunciation of some words such as: swim, cousin, sharpener. They also got confused with some letter from the alphabet and numbers.
Moreover, even though we expected a high number of children, we only had five children in total. At the beginnig I was worried whe I saw only five students for the reason that my teammates and I had organized our activities based in the quantity of children that were supossed to be in classes. Personally, I asked myself “How are we going to form the children is small groups?” ,”How are we going to develop our activities with only  five students? . However, in that  moment I remembered something important I learned in a previous worshop with Instructor Geovany (Coping with Stage fright and How to Speak in Public). He told us “In theatre, the scene has to continue, it does not matter the circunstances and issues that arise in an unexpected moment”. In other words, unexpected problems can arise also  in the classroom. However, we need to be prepared in order to face any problem and the most important is to continue the class, it does not matter if we only have three children in the class. I think, this was a challenging scenario that we had to deal with and solved it successfully. Finally, I liked the diagnostic class because my classmates presented interesting and interactive activities which were enjoyed by the children. The materials used were according to the age of the students (color, size, design).