Jessica CO1

For my first classroom observation I went to Vicky's Grammar class. She is an incredibly upbeat, kind and understanding teacher. She started the class out in a very positive way, engaging each student whether durig role call or afterwards. She took the time to see how each student was feeling, or how their week had been and then used the question 'What did you do yesterday?' for a review of the grammar they had learned in the previous class. She wrote the sentances down on the board and instead of correcting errors the students made she would pause or ask the question again so that they would realize that they had said something incorrectly and could fix it themselves. She also kept a running list of any new or useful vocabulary that came up during class and left the list on the board for the entire period. This made it easy for the students to refer back to in the following exercises or to copy down for later review. There was one very outgoing student in the class that at one point was making a joke about something and said 'I swear to my god!' He then paused and asked if it was supposed to be said 'I swear to god." or "I swear to my god." Vicky took the time to explain that this expression if used other than in a religious manner comes off as rude/offensive or is said in anger and that it's not always appropriate to use. It's really helpful to the students to understand why things are done the way they are in English and also in which setting it is appropriate to use certain expressions.
Another helpful thing she did was to keep a online stopwatch projected on the board during activities so that students could check how much time they have and learn to budget it. This is a useful tool to encourage quick thinking and also to get them in the mindset of having a limited amout of time to formulate responses as they will have to do on the TOEFL.