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Savannah CO #1

My first classroom observation was Sana McHarek's Grammar class. It was very interesting to see all of what we had been talking about in the TEFL class come alive in an actual CIES classroom. One of the ideas was using the term "Beautiful Mistakes" to describe mistakes that help the students learn. This lesson was focused on the simple future tense and the instructor began the lesson by having the students talk about what they planned to do after graduation. As the students spoke to their partners, McHarek walked around and wrote down the "beautiful mistakes" made by students so the class could later correct them together. After the pre-activity, the students said some examples of the sentences they used in their plans. McHarek wrote these sentences on the board and explicitly demonstrated how the future tense was used in them. I could tell that this helped some of the struggling students better understand the pattern of this specific aspect of grammar. The students then worked on an activity in which they described what they will do with visitors in their home country. After this activity, McHarek had a competition of boys against girls to see who could correct the beautiful mistakes. I was genuinely surprised by how much the competition motivated the students to participate! I could feel the class wake up a little bit with the idea of it. In the end, the girls won. I enjoyed this class because it gave me a few more ideas to make sure students are interested in this lesson. I noticed that one of the students was more willing to participate than other students. Sometimes his vocalness prevented participation from other students. McHarek countered this by thanking him for his participation but saying she wished others would participate. I thought this was a really good way to encourage more struggling students to participate

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