Celina_CO #1

     For my first classroom observation I sat in on a level 1 Grammar class. There were about 15   students in the class, all male except for one female student! The teacher started the class by posting a question on the board for all the students. The teacher asked each student to pair up and then converse with each other, answering the questions "what do you do when you leave CIES?" and "what movies are your favorite and why?"For about five minutes the student pairs spoke with each other. Then they were each asked to present to the class what they had learned about one another, with the teacher correcting the mistakes they said. This seemed like an easy yet productive way to start the class. It broke the ice a little bit, and got students to get in the mindset to be ready to learn grammar techniques.

Next, the teacher wrote a sentence on the board, "she cuts her hair." Then she posed the question to the class, was the sentence in simple present tense? The students gave their ideas and agreed that because it was a fact and routine that it was present tense. After that the teacher wrote the sentence "she is cutting her hair" and asked them to explain what tense this was in. The class seemed to struggle at first but then came to the conclusion that it was present progressive tense. 

The class then began to use their CIES grammar workbooks which were filled with awesome activities and examples to explain grammar terms and utilize them. The activity that the students started to work on involved 3 pictures of different actions (a man on a phone, a woman on a bike, and a couple dancing together). The activity was to identify the actions being done and complete the given sentences with the present continuous form of the verbs being used. Afterwards each student was asked to present some of the answers they came up with. 

I really enjoyed sitting in on this class. I was pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of English the students had, I didn't realize just how proficient Level 1 students actually were. It was very helpful to get a sense of what activities were most productive to use and how they should be taught. The idea of asking students to share after every activity seemed important as well.