Received these two tea towels from my parents back in England.
(I think they are celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, happening later this year.)

Ringtons is a long established company with old fashioned values, as in they still sell tea and coffee supplies door-to-door. As well as tasting great a lot of the teas and coffees are packed in great looking tin cans.

You can read more about the history of Ringtons here. On a language point you'll notice that the name is Ringtons with no apostrophe, the reason for this is explained on their website.

Sometimes the best laid plans can fall to bits or in the case of Phonic Reading Rods end up thrown all over the classroom. (Does anybody have any luck with these, great idea, but everytime I try to use them the children just go wild!)
The rods didn't work out so we pressed on with the lesson. we've been using a set of cards to teach the verbs 'eating', 'sitting', 'running', 'walking', 'swimming', 'sleeping' etc. For some reason they feature different animals doing the actions and are as such unrelated to the actual task.
When I reviewed these verb cards yesterday in the Elementary A class I was expecting the children just to tell me the verb. Well, imagine my surprise when they started to make sentences 'The giraffe is eating', 'The horse is running' etc.
Great stuff, I was so proud that I forgot all about them throwing the reading rods about.

Picture dominoes of various sorts have been a regular feature of our Sprouts and Kinder classes. The concept of the game can be taught to 4 year old's in 5 minutes, or so. Using pictures of pre-taught vocabulary, it makes a great reinforcing activity.

But I'd never really tried it in our beans class (0~3 years old,) until yesterday. We had a theme based around the Old McDonald song, using the slow and gentle version from Super Simple Songs. We'd used some flashcards/photographs of animals and as a final activity I reached for the box of Farmyard Dominoes.
While this age group don't usually have a grasp of winning and losing, the children soon understood that they had to match the animals from their cards. It was also a great chance to reinforce the 'taking turns' idea. Naturally its difficult keeping children of this age still, so I let them wander around if they wanted. All in all it was a successful activity and a lot of fun to boot!

The set of picture dominoes I used are made by Orchard Toys. All their games are made in England and have great durability (we use them in class almost daily!) Unfortunately there are not many stockists in Japan but I have seen some of their games at Bornelund.

How the year has flown past...only about a month left before Christmas and only 24 days until the englishpool Christmas Party!

We have recently launched eigonohondana a new service from englishpool to allow people across all of Japan to borrow English language graded readers. Reader series carried at the moment include Oxford Reading Tree, Project X, Floppy's Phonics, Songbirds, Rigby Star Independent and a few Scholastic Science Readers.

Basically for a low monthly subscription you will receive up to 10 books per month. Sending and returning postage are included in the price! There are over 300 titles to choose from at the moment and we will be adding more over the coming months.

The website is (mostly) in Japanese but as a lot of it is image driven it shouldn't be too problematic if you're just having a look around. (Note: The catalog pages are mostly bilingual!)

If you're interested in finding out more and need assistance navigating the pages please feel free to contact us.

We are working on adding more English pages so please bear with us.

eigonohondana