Personal Reflection by CORNELIA BONG (911201-13-5110) Working in a group of three, with my beloved comrades, Carolina Jiksing and Tengku

Zulhafizsyam under the supervision of Mdm. Azizah Abdul Kadir was a great and wonderful experience. I am quite worried when I was first assigned with this topic. I was imagining how a lesson could be conducted in silence. I was wondering how the teacher is going to give instructions and call out the students if they need to be silence. Another thing that I am worried about was how the teacher keeps the class in control when the pupils need to stay silent. However, my prior knowledge about silence in class was learned during lecture hours. It somehow tells me that the silence method should be a positive environment to provoke the thought of the pupils or let their minds work. In order to really understand how this method works, I went through plenty of books and search the internet for information. I also sought professional helps from the lecturer and my fellow friends to get the idea of what activity is suitable to carry out in class that practice this method of teaching. They suggested us to do phonetic class where they teach with Lego blocks, or to show pictures and have the pupil guess what they are. However, after further discussion with my mates, we had decided to show actions and ask the students to form words and sentence from the way we acted out.

We created a simple story and act the action word by word. Like in I count the money. Tengku Zulhafizsyam took the role to act I, I did the action verb count and Carolina acted out the noun money. Then, three of us did the actions continuously and the whole class finally understood that this combination of words form a complete sentence. We went from sentence to sentence until a complete paragraph is formed. Whenever the class were having difficulties to guess, we wrote a part of the words on board as to give clues.

From the comments that we received from our fellow classmates or audiences, there are more positive ones rather than negative. It somehow shows that we have successfully conducted the demonstration. The positive feedbacks that we get are basically on the way we presented and how it successfully grabbed the attention of the audiences with interesting flow. We had made them wonder and asking what the teachers in front really want to illustrate. This way had made them to put their thinking caps on as they tried to figure out the words and the whole story. The main text itself had kept the audiences amused as they want to know more and more and how the story ends. The story had a twisted plot, where audiences got to know that the robber is actually the grandchilds grandfather. Some find it interesting and funny since it was the grandfather who gave money and in the end he is the one responsible for the robbery. However, some looked at it in the way that it can be misleading and not suitable for the primary pupils. The children at this point are not fully developed and cant think rationally. The teachers further explanation is essentially needed to ensure that the pupils get the right ideas from content of the text.

We are also said to have made sincere attempt to provide hints for the actions we made. We also managed to give clear instructions in the set induction. I found that our audiences had no difficulty to response to the way we act. Somehow, the flow of the presentation was clear and seemed that everybody managed to follow our instructions. When I pointed out for them to answer the question, they stood and answer without making much commotion or noises.

Our main objective of teaching the audiences on the topic verb is successfully achieved. The choice of our text are suitable enough as it contains a lot simple verbs

which include greet, gives, take and count. There are suitable and comprehensible for our target, the Year 6 pupils of special education with good or average proficiency level. Every sentence in the text are said to contain different verbs that the audience can study such as Verb: cries, and verb to be: am. Our audience gave good responses in recognizing the verbs. However, we received comments that we should explain more on the use of verb and when do people use the verb to be like in present participle am frightened.

There are words that cannot be illustrated easily like the functional words the or the personal pronoun he. Here, we received suggestions of using pictures or flash cards if we have difficulty in portraying the word. However, most of the words had been guessed correctly by the audiences.

The materials we used like the face mask and the plastic knife are said to successfully enhance the audiences understanding of the text. These materials has helped us a lot to convey the words through the audiences as they are physically concrete and can be sensed through their sight.

In overall, I think I have performed a good job despite all my worries and problems I had in conducting the Silent way teaching method demonstration. There are many positive effects gained as I learnt to present confidently, handle the students in class, and receive critiques for personal improvement. As for myself, I think this presentation had helped me towards having a better and firm understanding on the topic that I am doing.