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Creating Material for a Lesson Plan and likewise, a complete course is one of the most challenging tasks for a teacher, it is as equally rewarding. Admittedly the only experience I have to date is a 120 hour in course TEFL with eight Lesson Plans that I procured from scratch along with a 50-hour online Business English Teaching Certificate Course with four Lesson Plans from the Tasks portion. However, this was a powerful learning experience and takes a new teacher far longer to come up with credible material to use in a classroom setting. Most of the difficulty lies within producing materials that are relevant to the topic, the English level of the class and that it’s not within the grounds of a copyright infringement. Searching through the material can take up much of your time if it has some vocabulary that students are not familiar with and there is not enough time in a lesson to pre-teach all of it, then you may have to take portions and reword it to fit into language that your students will understand. Although this presents a challenge, you are learning what works for different groups of students based on their respective levels of English and grammar. Individually, each lesson plan has taken me approximately four hours of total time to research and prepare from beginning to end. Learning how to create material for classes began the weekend of the first week of my 120 hour TEFL course in Bangkok so I believe it would be safe to say that the process began before I had a good grasp on teaching however it would become a detrimental factor in my overall development as a new teacher, it is a common saying that “one should jump in with both feet” or something of that nature. Commonly, most people use Google as a primary resource for research because of Google’s highly effective search engine tool and the ability to lead to a variety of other resource pages. Reading the course book and resources found online I was able to brainstorm ideas and form the structure of creating material for my lesson plan and devised matching visuals through powerpoint slides. While I found that plenty of material already existed, I believed that it would be completely inappropriate to use something entirely that belonged to somebody else, but it was great for being able to see how a course developed and came together so that I could mirror mine in the same image. Additionally, I used many other items to create my material such as but not limited to advertisements, brochures and menu’s (I even considered recipes and receipts). During one class I placed the students into groups of 6 because it was a class of 42 students and gave them an activity with the instruction that they were a tour group operator and they were tasked to choose a location often frequented by tourism and using the best pictures describe the location and what it had to offer to entice travelers in their own words to choose their tour agency and present it to the class (I also had to create my own to give a demonstration to the class). This proved to be a success although I didn’t prepare the students well enough for all of the vocabularies I improvised by asking each group to include six out of twenty vocabulary words to use in their tour package. I firmly believe and restate my claim that Creating Material is one of the most challenging yet rewarding aspects of teaching.
