Teachers' Resource Materials

Star Q

i.  Using Lemon Tree in a Lesson

ii.  Reading Activity - Form 4 : Chapter 8

iii.  Materials for a Complete Lesson

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I have been working with the government sector for thirty-one years and have been a teacher for twenty-eight of those years.  I must say that when it comes to rapport with students and the administrations I have experienced my ups and downs.  

 

One thing I can attest to is that, whenever I enter a class to teach, I always bring materials for me to use with my students in class; be they realia, worksheets, picture cards or something as simple as sentence strips.  However there is one thing that I very seldom bring to class, that is the textbooks.  To me, they are merely to guide me as to to the specific topics I am supposed to teach for a particular form and the different skills to be taught in that topic.

Teachers complain about the amount of time they spend on writing their lesson notes; I complained too.  But that never stopped me from creating my own materials for my students.  One basic reason why I create my own materials rather than using the textbooks is because,  textbooks are so standardized.  Let's take for example when I was teaching three form three classes.  Not all the students in the three classes have the same level of English Language proficiency.  The levels of proficiency of students in one class may greatly differ from the other.  Even students in the same class are not of the same proficiency level.  However, they are still expected to use the same textbook; each and everyone of them.  And that is the main reason why I never stopped creating materials for my students.

So, it came as a surprise to me when some colleagues found it insignificant to bring teaching resources to class for their students learning.  It was a bigger surprise when they could come up with a thousand and one reasons for not doing so.  Well, maybe not thousands but surely by the hundreds.

And even if they do bring resource materials to class, the materials would be unsuitable due to any one of the following reasons; (1) the resources lack variety, that is the same type of resources are brought into class all the time, (2) the resources which may be taken from the internet are not suitable to their student's level, or (3) the resources are recycled and outdated materials which are not made current according to the teaching year.

If teachers complain about the amount of time they spend on writing their lesson note, imagine how much more time a teacher (me included) would have to spend in creating the appropriate materials for their students.  The most difficult part is at the starting line.  Once you have accumulated enough materials for all the classes that you are teaching, you can safely keep them so that they can be adapted (or adopted) for use by future students.

In addition, materials that are ready on hand, can even be utilized by teachers who relief your classes when you have to be absent from teaching.  And your friends will thank you for giving them something to take to your class so that they will be able to tend to your students fruitfully.