This past week I spent time preparing lessons and teaching. On Tuesday, September 13, I prepared a lesson and taught my private adult class. On Wednesday, September 14, I taught my first lesson in a new class. On Friday, September 16th, I taught my first two classes at Teikyo University for the fall semester. I also ended this week teaching private lessons at a day-long high school AP program at Utsunomiya University. Every few months I am involved in this pre-college program for high school students. This is called I-PU and I have included a link (Japanese only, I cannot find an English version, unfortunately). For this week's blog, I will mainly list events and summarize happenings.
Ben's Class / Tuesday, 9/13
Our Classroom.
Next week, I hope to bring in some examples of work from this adult class. We went through a PowerPoint pdf of adjectives ending in -ing / -ed and discussed examples and we engaged in a pass-around activity by having having each person talk about a recent experience and how we felt (describing events, situations and feelings using the target: Adjective +ing or +ed). NOTE: I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to explain and approach this grammar item. Part of the challenge was to understand all of the uses of +ing and +ed as suffixes because I wanted to be able to answer questions about exceptions or different uses. The time I spent did pay off and the mini grammar lesson went well. The visual slides, clear examples, and practice that were part of the PowerPoint helped the class. Next week, we will practice this item a little bit more before moving on.
Creating Class / Wednesday, 9/14.
This first session of my new class went well. I will have some examples of student work in another week or so. The two students in the class are motivated and fairly advanced. We began with a warm-up activity of choosing slips of paper randomly and speaking about the topics on the paper. This worked ok, there was some excitement and focus since there was an element of surprise, however, I want to find a way to do a mini scaffold for these random topics so the students can stretch their language a little bit. Although, this could also be a solidifying activity with no scaffold help. I'm not sure yet. After speaking on different topics and engaging in conversation we turned towards creating. Both students had topics in mind and will present their topics as formal (basically) presentations on 9/28 in class. This will be preceded by a video version they will send me for feedback. One student is going to present about "Protein", and the other will present: "Differences between Japanese and English". We talked about presentation organization, discourse markers, and about physical presentation techniques.
Teikyo University / Friday, 9/16
Week 1
Class is small: 8 students this week, but maybe a few more added next week.
I wrote the following on the board, but didn't introduce it orally.
- Warm-up activity: Introduce yourself and include the following: Greeting, name, age, major at university, hometown or where you live now, 1 thing you like about your hometown and 1 thing you don't like about your hometown ( or where you live now).
- We talked about the class and syllabus, with special attention to a new addition this semester: Weekly minute-long speeches. Each weekly speech is connected to the unit being studied.
- Unit 6's objective is: Past Tense / talking about past life events.
- Along with introducing the unit ( talking about birthday's), completing a worksheet on irregular verbs ( which I hope they use in their speeches, and we practiced a little bit) , I assigned textbook work for homework (Past tense listening, grammar). Finally, about twenty minutes was spent talking about speech 1 and taking some in-class time to brainstorm and write notes. (Perhaps my board writing needs some improvement). I hope to write more clearly on the chalkboard.
Things to think about for speech 1: We talked about creating mind-maps for brainstorming ideas.
I didn't want to overwhelm them with organization details because I want the students to feel free to present information in their own way.
Speeches should be uploaded and placed on our class Padlet. I changed the board after this, but didn't update the picture above. We have a class padlet and all students can edit and place their speeches there. I want the students to get a sense of creative accomplishment at the end of the course. I will include this link next week when the speeches go up.Monday, 9/19
I worked from home and taught 30-minute lessons in blocks of three all day. It was fun and tiring. A pre-college and kind of advance placement program offered courses and English lessons several times a year. The link in Japanese is below. I will do this three times this semester.
The lessons were thirty minutes long. I had no information about the students prior and so we: Introduced ourselves, I asked them to tell me five things about themselves and then we proceeded per each students goals.
I have been focusing on encouraging creative projects to practice English. Since my students do not have enough speaking time in English I feel they should do real-world creating. So many of the students I had I recommended that they keep a journal, diary or create a simple blog, write stories, create dialogues and dramatic scripts. I encouraged them to share their skills.
https://c-bio.mine.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp/iP-U/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2022/09/Vol.28.pdf
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