Teaching a small class

This summer I teach an intensive course in Spanish here in Morocco. I have 5 students in my group, one boy and four girls. They are all between 13 - 23 years old and they all come to WORK. They write a lot in class and most of them actually study a couple of hours each evening, so they come to class prepared and with lots of questions. It's a great group!

They have 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. In all they are going to have 34 hours. In 11 days of class we've covered 9 lessons in the DELE, A2. Actually they are all B1, but when we created the groups the intention was to have one A1 and one A2 in the mornings and one B1 in the evening, and then it turned out to be A1 in the morning and the evening (2 different groups) and my A2-B1 in the morning. I work with the A2-book but do every chapter in one or two days. Besides that, I add a LOT of my own material.

Actually, with such a small group the students are able to speak a lot and about different topics. I want them to talk about anything, so sometimes we start talking about one topic and end up talking about something totally different. I like that feeling of freedom, of being able to let go of my programmed activities and let the students decide. That way the class is much more dynamic and I think they learn without them knowing it. Of course, this works in a small group like mine. In a class with 25 students the whole situation would be a chaos if the teacher let go too much.