Rebecca_CO#3

Classroom Observation #3 (15.02.10)

09:00 – 09:50

Today I observed Vicky Golen’s Group 1A speaking class. She began class by writing the agenda on the board.

Agenda:

1.                Practice the Present Continuous

2.                Culture Discussion

3.                Gestures

4.                Presentation Info.

Then she started the lesson by asking how everyone was, since this class is right after lunch. Ms. Golen used this moment to teach some vocabulary as well, because she said that she was sleepy after eating a large meal, and the students did not know what “sleepy” meant. They worked together to understand the term.

After, the class did an exercise involving charades to work on the present perfect tense. Each student picked a card and acted out what is said, then the rest of the class had to guess what they were doing using the present continuous tense. The students seemed to have a lot of fun during this activity, and Ms. Golen let me participate with her by having us charade the card “high-five.” This became another vocabulary teaching moment.

Then Ms. Golen moved on to the culture part of the class. She put up a list of scenarios on the screen, and picked one about how to treat waiters/waitresses at a restaurant. The students were to discuss how they treated restaurant staff in their own countries, then had to devise a roleplay script based on one of the countries. A timer was set for twelve minutes. Ms. Golen surveyed the room while taking notes, and she asked questions to different groups during their discussion. After the twelve minutes, each group modeled their roleplay for the class. There was full class error correction afterwards.

To end the class, a few more questions were asked. I found them familiar because they were the same subjects we talked about in Ramin’s Group 4 speaking class. Ms. Golen asked students about how to treat older people and children in everyone’s countries. The discussion became rather funny when one of the men in class who is from Columbia related that children are scary and gave a story of his daughters.