time to be serious..

A lot of work to be done within this two weeks.. I really cannot make up all those works during the previous week because of the Raya Holiday. I haven't started on any of the assignment given but i believe that everything will be allright if i am strictly follow the schedule made.. There is no lesson going on during yesterday class but we were given time to work on our assignments. It is good for the moment since I have finished working on the first material but non of lesson plan. INSYALLAH.. within this week i will make sure everything will be on time. At this time, i should be mentally-readily prepared for the pressure and stress. Learn to work under pressure..

However, i have bumped into this paragraph where there is something that make me think twice..

If you’re waiting until the last minute to complete an assignment because you like that rush you get from being under pressure, and you think that’s when you do your best work, think again. While it may be true that you’ll finish the work quicker because the pressure makes you move faster, is it that you’re finishing the work because you’ve done your best, or are you ending the work because you’ve run out of time? Did you have time to put the finishing touches on it, or did you raise the bar, taking your work to a new level? Probably not. Instead, you threw something together, was satisfied with mediocre, took chances that nothing would go wrong, created a lot of unnecessary stress for yourself, and then plopped down to start procrastinating all over again.
by Peggy Duncan
http://stress.about.com/od/managetimeorganize/a/battlingprocras.htm

Creating Materials for ESL classroom

Last week, my group has presented the topic from the article "Creating materials for ESL classroom". After reading the article, I have come into understanding that it is really important for a teacher to adapt the materials in order to suit the pupils' level of proficiency and learning objectives. At the same time, the articles also highlighted that it is vital for a teacher to really know on how to choose the existing materials that are readily available to be used in the classroom in which can help the teacher to save time, effort, and expenses. At this point, i believe that a teacher does not merely adapt the materials since there are always good reasons for doing adaptation. Adjustment is made to suit pupils’ interest and needs, for example; materials produced for native speakers (first language learners) can be adjusted into non-native speakers (second language learners) where some sentence structures and vocabulary are to be adapted. Besides that, adjustments are needed in terms of glossaries, key words and explanations of language aspects. In addition, I also believe that teachers are doing adaptation in order for the specific use. For instance, teacher may work on a specific context in order to attract pupils’ attention to the grammatical point or language structure when using an authentic language in the classroom. Looking back to the class presentation, we also have included the example of "THE TOMATO" by Prof. Larry M.Lynch. The example make us realize that familiarization is another important elements for a pupil to acquire knowledge and generate their thinking. Plus, the using of familiar materials such as realia (real materials) in the classroom also helps teacher to manipulate the input easily and effectively.

What do I know about newsletter?

From my own understanding and reading, newsletter is a publication that is regularly distributed to the subscibers. Subsribers may be the members of the organizations or someone who is intersted with the content of the newsletter. Generally, newsletter contains one main topic of interest. For example, my group is doing newsletter for the School of Young English Learner and our newsletter is all about English Week.

Other examples of newsletters are newspapers and leaflets. I have read that nowadays, newsletters delivered electronically via email (e-Newsletters) have gained rapid acceptance for the same reasons email in general is gaining popularity over printed correspondence. General attributes of newsletters include news and upcoming events of the related organization.

During the task, I was incharged for the newsletter compilation. Thus, i have to do all the designing parts as well as rearrange and make sure that the newsletter look well-organized and attractive enough for the readers to read. As we are doing for school newsletter, our readers are the school children. At this point, it is very important to choose the contents, fonts, graphic, and colours; in order to ensure the suitability of the readers' interest.

Micheal Jackson the Assignment

I was a bit of confusing with the lesson plan format as was given in the assignment. Thus, i decided to make a full and complete lesson plan. i dont know whether this is accepted or not but by designing a completed lesson plan, it gives me satisfactions of doing this assignment. I have completed the task last night and this morning we are going to recheck each other work where we are going to polish and repair any part that what should be.

Sometimes, I just wondering why should we make the same tutorials that we used to make. I understand that the weekly assignment required us to do the tutorials as we are learning and gaining skills from new software or the software that we never used before. At this time, again, we are required to do the same tutorials that everybody has done before. It seems like the tasks that we are engaging are repeated, apart from the assignment development. Anyway, I believe that the coordinator and assignment desingner have their own objectives and rationales which must be beneficial for everyone and every task.

The Four Skills

Today, I will be handling the “Four Skills” assignment. I have worked on the assignment almost ¾, suddenly I realize that something is going wrong. I have forgotten that the topic for my group is people whereby I was working on topic food. It is my own carelessness and me, myself, really upset about that since I have to do the work twice.. I have to stay up for the rest of the night until sahur. That was the thing that I have to pay due to my own inattention.

Basically, my materials are pictures and video. Pictures downloaded from the internet were being put into video track and a video was developed. I used this video to teach writing. This video is about occupation. The material is able to provide a useful input for the pupils before they start their writing. It means that the pupils are gaining some ideas of how to write descriptions by using appropriate punctuations, nouns, verbs, and sentence structures. At the same time, the pictures and written descriptions in the video work as stimulus for the pupils to activate their schemata of prior knowledge about writing descriptions. Since the video presents the pictures together with the descriptions, I believe that pupils can easily gain understanding. Thus, the role of classroom assessment will be more reliable and useful.

Creating My Own E-BooK

I have bumped into a website that provide a collections of online storybooks for young learners. I have come across a story in the website and found it very intersting. So, i decide to adopt and adapt the story for my e-book project as well as to suit the learning outcomes and curriculum specification that I have chosen. As a continuity, I have downloaded some other pictures and sounds to fit in the story. I started to work on the project until finish line.

Thus,I have completed my e-book. Developing an E-Book is something that can be called interesting. I have developed an e-book for Year 3 pupils under the theme of world of story, entitled "The Adventure Of Fish and Frog". I choose a frog and a fish as the main characters in the story as it is believed that the characters are familiar to young learners. I also included antagonist characters in a small part of the story, in which a large bird stole their lunch. The story is about a short journey of Frog and Fish as they are going to smell a giant flower on the west side, how their lunch had been stolen, and how they helped each other. As usual, there are always moral values. In this story, I presented the young learner with the values of understanding, similarities, differences, patience, helpful and caring. This is very important as examples to them to develop young learners behaviors and attitudes as they are going through the growing process.

Dance Overtiredness To Kampung

Last week was a very exhausting moment. We have to complete the enjoyable task in which turned into the most complicated task..! Our group is the earliest group who handed in the task (thanks to Adila and other group members.). We uploaded in on ADEC but some of the videos are in bad condition even though it was in .avi format. I was asked to change the format even though the format was already in .avi. What does it means?

The night before the date due, since everyone unable to upload the video on ADEC, a representative announced that the video can be burned into a DVD. I did not feel the stress until a group member who was unable to control her emotions vomited her dissatisfaction about all this chaos into me. She may felt relieved after crying and throwing all her frustration in front of me but did she ever considered what I would feel after listening to all this? Did she thought that I would also feel relieve like her? Only god knows…

I was the only group member who was in KL at the moment and I have to do this all alone. Luckily, I have all the materials since a group member had given me the materials before she went back to her hometown. Another group member was helping me online even though she was at kampung (thanks to faizah). In the middle of the night I went to a friend’s house to get the DVD-R and went to 7-E to buy another DVD-R as a back up. I work all night until morning to compile all the materials and tutorials in the DVD. In the early morning, I gave the REQUIRED DVD to a friend (thanks to zima) before going back on the Saturday morning and slept silently along the journey to kampung...