My new experience: "Teacher of the Year 2016"

On January,12 2016 "Teacher of the Year 2016" contest took place in Kharkiv and I participated in it.

So I want to share with you, my dear friends, my new experience, feelings and expectations which I had during that contest and after it.

The first stage of the contest was a proficiency level test which I passed successfully and went to the next stage

The second stage was a lesson which I had to conduct in an unknown school for unknown students.I am an English teacher of a secondary school and I have been working for 11 years, but to conduct a lesson in a specialized school with a deep study of foreign languages was a really new experience for me. My task was to explain my new students of the sixth grade why all people in the world were different. I mean the topic of my lesson was "Personality. Traits of character". 

We learnt new words, played games, watched the video about children's likes and dislikes, read about music tastes and found out what the real friendship was like.

At the end of the lesson my new students and I became real friends and sang a lovely song by Bruno Mars about friendship:

I really like this song! Isn't it lovely?

Though I was a little bit nervous ( and who wouldn't have been ?!), I coped with my task and went to another one level. 

So here we are - the finalists of the contest, those 4 teachers out of 26 who have survived :)

And the last third stage of our contest was so called master class. It's a way of presentation of teacher's experience. I decided to represent the way of developing students' critical thinking skills with the help of strategy of six thinking hats, invented by Edward de Bono.

The result of the contest made me happy - I became a laureate of  "Teacher of the Year -2016" contest.

I want to thanks my dearest and nearest - my family, my friends who supported me all that time and believed in me.

This contest was an amazing opportunity for me to develop my skills, to practise my knowledge, to find out something new and important for a teacher. I met amazing people devoted to their work who shared their experience with others.

I'm very glad to have such an amazing experience in my life.