Sept 23/20
This class looked like it was a lot of fun!
The class had about 30 middle school students, and 2 teachers. The course material seemed to be an entire teaching package, with activities built to follow and supplement the textbook lesson. This lesson was a speaking class about using the past tense.
The lesson began with the teachers modelling the dialogue of a conversation on “How was your vacation?”, and “How was your weekend?”. It was a lead-in to the first portion of the class that was a pattern of the students doing a look and listen activity with a video conversation, then a listen and repeat activity with the same dialogue.
Next was a song that was the dialogue. It was sung, but it also was practice of intonation and sentence flow. It was first modelled by the teacher and then sung by the whole class with the song speeding up each time through the chorus.
The final 20 minutes of the class was a team game practicing past tense. With each round the students were asked for the past tense of a given verb. The object of the game was to have students provide the direct object of the past tense verb. The teams each had a whiteboard and marker. For each round they were given time to brainstorm as many answers as possible. The game play was to go to each team in turn and get them to say the sentence with one their answers, but they could not repeat any answers that had been given previously. I thought this was a great game. It was both collaborative and competitive. The students got more invested with each round.
Throughout, the teachers used hand gestures and hand clapping patterns to cue the students. This class was fast-paced, but had a high level of student engagement and enthusiasm.