Anna CO #2

Anna Prorok

September 12, 2014

CIES Observation No. 2

Kyle Kaminski, Grammar, Group 1A

Last Friday I had a great time observing a Level 1 grammar class. The teacher, Kyle Kaminski, was very happy and energetic when the students came into class. He started the class with a practice/review assignment on pronouns. The students were given a list of sentences and they had to either fil in or replace the underlined names with pronouns. He utilized the online timer to keep the students on track while they worked on the assignment. After the time was up, he reviewed each of the answers to the questions. He transitioned into another assignment where the students were able to work in pairs to check the answers to their homework worksheets. They were given a 5  minute time limit for this activity as well. The homework assignment they were checking was easy work to build fluency. He relayed this to the students so they knew what the purpose of the worksheet was - I thought it was great that he let the students be more aware of what they were learning. There was one student in particular who had difficulty focusing and Kyle used a lot of positive reinforcement with him which seemed to get him more focused on the activities at hand. 

After the break, the students were given a quiz with a time limit of 15 minutes. The classwork in the beginning of the class was to get them prepared for the quiz. For the quiz, the students were given a single pronoun that they had to write a sentence with. They had 10 of these to do. 

After the quiz, Kyle gave a PowerPoint presentation that also acted as a formative assessment because the students had to answer which present continuous verb conjugation was to be used on each example sentence. After the presentation, he had the students participate in a fun activity called SWAT. SWAT is essentially what it sounds like. The students were divided between two team. One person from each team came up to the board with a fly swatter. Kyle had a sentence with a blank and two word options, one being correct and the other being incorrect. The first student to SWAT the correct answer won that round. 

Altogether, this was a wonderful observation and I picked up some great ideas that I look forward to using in my classroom. Kyle is a highly motivated, energetic, and fun teacher who is very well-respected by his students. It was a pleasure getting to observe such a great class.