Casey CO #1

Monday, 10:00-10:50AM 

2A Grammar

Olivia James

At the beginning of this class session Professor James began by handing out textbooks to students who did not yet have their textbook, in order for them to complete work in for the rest of the session. She partnered students up into pairs and labeled some of the pairs as more "advanced".

She introduced the Our Planet film that she was going to use for the class exercise as well as explain what she expected from everyone. She told the class that they would be watching scenes from the film and, as partners, to write sentences about what they observed. She explained that another example of how to use this method for practice would be to go outside and watch what people do around you and put the actions into present continuous as well as focus on vocabulary that describes their actions. She specifically told those who were deemed as "advanced" that they were expected to include adjectives and adverbs to build more developed sentences during this exercise. 

We watched 4 movie clips about the earth, the sun, the clouded leopard, and the silverback gorilla. Professor  would stop the clips and allow students to work together to build sentences. As this was happening, Professor would walk around the class and assist in creating verbs to describe what was going on in the scenes which she would include on the whiteboard. Professor also clarified how verbs would be spelled in the present continuous form which some students needed help with. 

Once all the groups wrapped up their conversation, Professor asked each group to say what sentences they came up with and then she discussed with the class on whether it was a proper sentence. If the sentences needed to be rewritten she worked with the students to fix it together. 

This lesson gave me an idea on what kind of exercises to use to engage students into subjects like grammar that might not be as fun or exciting as others. I also got to see how verb tenses are explained in the classroom setting in a way that is easy to remember that is not very confusing.