Reflection on Mrs.Joanna's lesson

            Mrs. Joanna is a unique lady who possesses a charming energetic personality. She is creative, imaginative and artistic by nature in class and anywhere. She entered our classroom carrying stuff that usually goes to the waste basket or for recycling. There were bags filled with cardboard, stationary, and boxes of various colors, shapes and sizes. Her touch of art was clearly visible by using personification, as she placed the scarf over her posters an image of human being attending her poetry exhibition could be interpreted in our mind. The table was full and I found myself engaged in finding room for her to display her posters. I was searching for things that I might find in my classroom to make her posters steady; wondering about what her next step might be. Mrs. Joanna started by advising us that we should always be prepared and ready, to be well equipped showing us her pencil case, stapler, scotch tape, scissors, crayons, A4 papers and also nylon bags. She was pointing at the frames and edges of her posters coaching us to make ours clear, neat and to leave a little white border to make it look better. She was aware of every single incident related to her lesson. Then she started generating her questions, what can we do with a big “fridge box” and she continued like that until she heard the magic word “puppet” her lessons’ objective. She cut a medium size box and created a “puppet theater” with a white curtain made out of the nylon bag. While cutting the cardboard, she was very professional and she did not forget to create a painting background to make her theater appealing to the audiences. She was directing us to let our students do things themselves, to paint, glue and cut their drawings. She was the master and we were her puppet toys as she asked us to write within 10 minutes a story and perform it in the puppet theater. We found ourselves involved in writing a dialogue, creating characters, drawing and coloring them, cutting their shapes and gluing them on A4 paper stick, then playing our roles and acting.

  Mrs. Joanna manipulated art to facilitate learning. She demonstrated a lesson in a smooth way moving for one activity to another linking them together without the students’ recognition of the transaction. She used story telling from beginning to the end of her lesson as she was narrating to us about her life and experiences, about the kid wearing the hat on Independence Day, and about the edges of the frames, drawing. Her intention was to guide, prompt, and encourage us to be creative and to involve our students in doing their part of work. She used critical thinking by making us deduce her “rules” which she did not state, but lead us to conclude them. Everything she said or did was implemented in her lesson. She used inductive method, inquiry for experiential learning in a communicative way and she made the students collaborate to produce their puppet show. We were engaged in writing the activity in pairs. By doing this the students used brainstorming and the four skills, as we were speaking when discussing our script, writing it then reading it and later on, when acting we were the real audiences listening and watching each other puppet show. The learning was teacher centered and student centered in the same session. All This proves how professional Mrs. Joanna is.