Class Journal: Week 6, Warm up reflection

I planned my warm up activity with a couple of goals in mind.  First, I wanted to get students quickly and comfortably interacting with me and each other.  And secondly, I wanted to establish a pattern of resolving problems of CI.  As always I made my plan roughly and fine tuned it over the course of the week.  By the time I got around to class 6 I think I had it pretty well worked out.  I started with introducing the expressions I wanted students to use this week when asking for help or checking meaning.  (The expression used is different every week to keep thing interesting)  Then I employed choral repetition to make sure they are comfortable saying it, and just to be sure they would be able to use it in class, I left the 2 expression written up on the WB for the entire lesson.  Then I wrote up the first warm up question.  (Referential and open in this case.)  Read it aloud and briefly explained one or two words I had pre-identified as problematic (from previous classes) to make it comprehensible.  In hindsight, I think it also helped them to activate their schema.   Then I elicted possible answers from the class.  Calling on individuals when volunteers were not forth coming.  When students where gave one word answers I would call on them to make a sentence.  If they got stuck I would try to mime the words of the sentence I was looking for one by one.  If that didn't work I might say the same sentence in Korean and ask them for a English translation.  Finally, if that wasn't working I would remind them to use the "asking for help" expression to call on a class mate.  Once I got a couple of answer I would write them up as general sentence structure they could use to form many sentences.  Then I elicited a follow up question and answer for that in the same way.  By then we've collaboratively constructed a mini-dialog.  I then modeled the dialog by getting a student to ask me the questions and then answering, following the structure I had just written up.  After that it was pair practice to get people talking and after that I would do it together with the class TSST style, just to hold them accountable and to catch out slackers in the pair work.
I think I achieved my goals for this activity quite well, so I was pleased.  This is the second time I've done something like this so they seemed to understand what I was expecting this time around.