Teaching Terminale!

So for the final part of my assistantship in Lille, I was working with students in Terminale. They were mainly aged between 17 and 18 (although some were 19) and they were preparing for their BAC exams.

Most of the time I was given groups of 5-3 students and I had to do mock oral exams, so they had to present a 'notion' that they had worked on to me and I had to give them feedback.

 I always asked the students if they wanted to have a couple of minutes to prepare and after their preparation (reading notes) they had to present their work to me.

The majority were incredibly nervous, even though I told them so many times that I wasn't marking them or going to tell the teacher, but overall I was sooo impressed with them and always encouraged them.

Other groups still had to do proper lessons. I tried to incorporate the 'mock exams' into these classes as much as possible so that I could work out which areas they needed to improve. The problems varied but were mainly pronunciation, sentence structure and giving genders to random objects like tables (The table was nice, she was wooden and brown - obviously they weren't doing lessons on tables but this was the only example I could think of).

Other than the mock exam parts of the lessons, I tried to get them to do mind maps of the notions so that we could prepare potential exam questions together. For example, for the notion of progress I had them mind map everything that they knew about progress such as new technology, medicine, science, politics etc. etc.) and then we went through them together. After, I gave them a sheet with a question on like 'Is progress always positive?' and 2 columns with titles 'yes' and 'no'. We then as a class used the board to write our arguments for each column and then the students had to summarize and present their overall ideas to me.

These lessons worked incredibly well and most of the students told me they found it very helpful.

If anyone is looking for ideas of lesson plans or things to do with students in terminale in preparation for their exams, do not hesitate to ask me!

Sorry this post is so short, I will be doing longer posts again soon.

Thank you for reading!

Emily