A FOCUS ON CHILDREN CHARACTERISTICS...

This was the third week for the lecture and photo editing was one of the focus in the classroom. 'A picture worth thousand words'. This expression depicts that even a single picture may tell or describe you a lot of things, and the message brought through the picture may be differently interpreted among different people. Hence, it is very important for teachers to choose a picture that is suitable to be displayed in the classroom, considering its size, colour, brightness and others as this will influence the atmosphere and the acceptance of students towards the classroom activities. Since children were very attracted to colourful pictures, it is like a must for teachers to apply the skill of photo editing in the classroom, especially if the picture was taken from the internet, since not all pictures available in the internet are suitable for student viewing. Pn Foziah told us that there were numbers of tutorials and software downloads available in the internet, for instance using grafix_design.com and online photo edit, for instance fotoflexer.com and mypicasa.com. Although this was a bit complicated to me, I cannot wait to explore the beauty of photo editing, since it sounds qiute interesting and really useful for future use in my assignment.

In addition, the lecture for this week was also focusing on young learners characteristics and how the working process with them will take place. As we know, young learners were very unique. It was not easy to work with them and due to their special characteristics, many educators and researchers has spent a lot of their time in discovering the uniquness of young learners, so that the teacher may apply the best teaching method in the classroom to suit with their needs.

Working with young learners require knowledge of their ability to grasp meaning, creative use of limited language resources, capacity for indirect learning, instinct for play and fun, the role of imagination, and the instinct for interaction and talk. The discussion on all this criteria has been done through group presentation, and all of us get to know all the criteria clearly and in details, since Puan Foziah asked us to simplify the notes given to each group. For instance, in my group presentation, I get to know in details about children's capacity for indirect learning, and as teacher, it is a must for me to balance the indirect and direct learning, which can be done through real task activity. One of the best example is using games, in which both direct and indirect learning may work at the same time. In conclusion, the variety and complexity of children's characteristics required teachers to be well-equipped with skills and knowledge in order to achieve the aims and objectives of the lesson.