Today I observed Leslie Wagner's Grammar class for level 2 students. They seem to be at the stage where there are a ton of rules floating around in their heads, and they are learning to balance them out into grammatically correct English sentences. It was interesting to watch them and remember my own experiences at that stage in learning a foreign language.
Leslie started out with a review of the simple past tense and had the students conjugate a list of verbs into past tense. Then we watched a video and wrote down what was happening using those verbs in simple past tense and shared them with the class. Next she reviewed "used to" and had the students partner up to ask questions about what they used to do or didn't use to do. All the while she was walking around and offering corrections or assisting with misunderstandings. We moved on to a new topic next: Past Continuous. After using a newspaper cartoon to demonstrate Leslie explained the rules of use, and we spent the rest of class practicing with a few exercises.
I really enjoyed how we kept mixing things up with different types of exercises. We did a video, pair work, group work, and writing sentences at various times. It felt like it kept things fresh and seemed focused on putting the grammar into practice which is so important for learning a language.
Yea I'm realizing more that having a few different activities during a class period can be a great way of keeping students interested in the topic you are teaching.
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