To make class more fun and get more students engaged, we came up with a warm-up activity called Act It Out. While Sarah was checking attendance and giving instruction, I sent a word to each student in a private chat. An active student stood up and turn on the camera, saying hi to everyone and making actions to describe the words she got. she was a bit confused about how she should describe in the beginning, but she was doing well later after Sarah and I explained a bit more. It went well for two or three students. The good thing is that few students are engaged in guessing in the chat box.  Other students, especially Chinese students, refused to join. However, we anticipated this situation when we plan our class, so we told them that they could unmute themselves to describe the word they had. Some of the students were trying to describe with help from teachers, but some of them were reluctant to join. In this case, we should have given examples by the corporation between Sarah and me. Also, we could have asked Brian to join us and set examples for students.

For today’s class, we emphasized various verb tenses that could represent future use, simple present, and present progressive. We facilitated students to distinguish the usage of simple present for present and future uses, and practice using present progressive for future use.  Besides, we shared a video to show the difference between two forms of simple future. Then we played Kahoot. Sarah did a poll to interact with students if they ever heard about Kahoot and I explained what Kahoot is to students. Considered some students in China, we asked students who were incapable of joining to type answers in the chat box. It went well even though fewer students in our class. At last, we let students practice simple future and simple past through our questions of exit tickets.

Overall, it went flow and organized, the only thing is that it is hard to call on quiet students to answer questions and check if they were catching up with the whole class during sharing with class after group work. Another thing is to change the way we nominate students to share like asking volunteers and nominating them directly. Apparently, it does not work for Chinese students. Most of them prefer listening instead of speaking.  It was discouraged when students could not give you any response. We decided to ask Brian to make patriation mandatory to encourage students to join our grammar lab.