Diagnostic class.

It is really important before we start teaching and start planning our lesson, it is really important that we as teachers make sure about the previous knowledge students have in the language.  And that is the first thing we have to do.  It is the first class  of a course or a semester to measure the understanding, the vocabulary or the skill of the target langua we will teach.

In order to gather that information, we divided the class into some basic topics such as:

• The alphabet.
• The numbers.
• The colors.
• The personal pronouns.
• Family members.
• Animals.
• Classroom objects.
• Action verbs.

We created some different activities to know the previous knowledges about this topics. Even if we face some problems with the number of students; because we were expecting 20, and we had just 5 students, it was really interesting to see how  some of them have already some knowledge about each topic.
Even though i thought on how we were going to arrange the activity just for 5 students, or if we needed to change the activities to the one we had presented, it was a nice and rewarding experience because we interact with our students and they felt confident while we were with them.

Each team start their activities, and some students knew not all the vocabulary but  part of it they already had some knowledge. As the purpose of the diagnostic class was to identified what students know in some specific topic, the activity were aim to show that, somehow it was successful, but of course they had some troubles with some little things.
For example in numbers and alphabet, students knew most of the letter and number they just have some problems with some letter that they tend to confuse, such as G, J and Y, while in number the one that cause the problems was the 17.
Also they had some troubles with the pronunciation and meaning of some words, even if they knew it in spanish, they were doubting on how to say it or if it was correctly, for example words like: sharpener, sun, uncle, swim, and some words like: pencil and pen, G and J were confusing for them.

Finally I just want to emphasize on the importance of having interactive activities to enhance and motivate our students learning, and to help them with the visual aids so they can internalize in a better way. material should be an important tool to teach children, this materials should be according to the age of students, and is important to remember the color and the size, they should be catching and interesting for their eyes.

Here I am attaching some pictures of the activities we were doing in class: