Katie CO #1

Today I observed Ms. Leslie Wagner's Group 2 grammar class. The topic for today was the simple past tense. The class began with a review of the material from the last class, the simple present and perfect present tenses. Ms. Wagner put the 10 most common errors she saw from the last class on the board. She had students attempt to correct the errors individually first, and then they went over the errors as a class. Next there was a warm up for the past tense where the students got partners and told each partner about their weekend. They had to use specified vocabulary to describe their weekends. This was a verbal activity only. After partner discussions were complete, each person in the class had to tell the rest of the class what their partner did over the weekend. After this activity, Ms. Wagner had the students read a passage about Roanoke colony and underline the past tense verbs. This activity incorporated culture into the lesson. Ms. Wagner allotted about 8 minutes to read the passage before the class discussed what the reading was about. The final activity involving the reading was for the students to individually think of what might have happened to the settlers of Roanoke. After this Ms. Wagner spend a short time doing a fill in the blank activity to go through the negatives of the simple past tense. The last activity of the day was to pick an adjective from a given list and tell a story about a past event that happened that can be described using that adjective. The students had a short time to think of a story and then share it with a partner. I thought the format of the class flowed well and there was a variety of activities to involve the students in.