REFLECTION

We have chosen the topic of animals as we thought we could prepare and interactive and
enjoyable unit for young learners. Working with young learners is always fun job, and we
wanted to have fun while preparing this project as the final challenge of our course. The topic
might also be interesting for the students as children love animals, and they always want to
talk about them during their daily lives. Considering all of these factors, Animals for second
graders from the national curriculum was the perfect choice for us to work on.

During the preparation of this project, 'require learner participation' from ASSURE Model
was the area that we spent most of our time. Our idea was to involve student into the lesson
actively rather than just lecturing the topic / theme of the unit. We wanted to prepare
enjoyable and interactive activities so that students do not feel they are being taught
something. We wanted them to discover the target items by self-discovery. In our lesson plans,
we tried to put a facilitator model for the teacher for most of the time, and we tried to design
our while-post activities mostly on learners' participation.
Apart from the 'require learner participation', we also focused on 'analyse learners' to be able
to create lessons which are in accordance with the learners' profile and their interests. Stating
objectives was much easier as our students are only 2nd graders, and we only wanted them to
be in a process of learning basic animals names and how to express something that we
can/can't do. As we stated above, our aim was to create a fun and communicative
environment, and therefore, we chose desuggestopedia alongside with tutorials, presentations
and games so that students would be able to interact with each other, and enjoy the time of
their lessons.
We determined that listening and speaking should be our skills that are on focus, because we
thought the learners were too young to absorb too much grammar input, and they should be
exposing the language as much as possible at their ages. For the time of 6 hours, we mainly
got stick to listening activities, playing games, and spending time with visual aids. As for
utilizing materials, we put so many visual and audial materials, which are mostly online, and
we tried to make benefit from the technology as much as we could. For the final step of the

model, we designed a 10-question quiz where we can test their knowledge on the topic /
theme of the unit after covering everything, and we evaluated our lessons at the end to see
how much we would achieve our objectives, which we thought was sufficient enough to
present an interactive and enjoyable lesson for young learners.
While preparing our materials, we quite enjoyed the time we spent as the topic allowed us to
work on pictures, and songs and games mostly. It was a decision between two most enjoyable
activities, and the technological aids' design, even if they were a bit challenging to some
extent , was quite an experience in terms of practising online apps and tools. They were, we
believe, indeed very important and beneficial tools that we, as prospective teachers, will be in
need of them in the future, and this experience's most crucial aspect was to experience a
process of designing a whole unit with a lot of material adaptation and development while
trying to achieve our objectives of our lessons.

Ali Kavas
Melis Odaba