I've had a box of Scrabble Junior lying around the classroom for ages, but had struggled to use it in my classes. Various reasons..but even on the easiest game there didn't seem to be much educational value getting students to lay tiles over ready spelt words.
Until today that is...in what can only be described as a flash of inspiration, I grabbed some card and cut it up into blank tiles. I then wrote lower case alphabet letters on. And voila! I now have a new game for reinforcing the lower case alphabet...which is essential if I'm to reach my goal of getting all our young students into the habit of reading!
So, if you've got a box of Junior Scrabble lying around gathering dust, get cutting that card!


...of course my ultimate goal is to have my students challenge me to game of real Scrabble (no pictures) but that seems all a long way off at the moment.

Last week we had a few stories from London involving Japanese interests so I decided that we'd introduce a new section to the quiz called London Calling...great chance to get The Clash into the mix as well!
So if you want to check if your students have been keeping up with current affairs grab a copy of the quiz, and notes for you, below:

Student Notes (PDF 172KB)

Teacher Notes (PDF 196KB)

During my lesson planning for a class on Saturday I decided that we'd concentrate on the two adjectives 'long' and 'short'.
I'd already decided to use play dough in the class so the kids could see who could roll out the longest sausage, who could make it short. And possibly we could also include 'big' and 'small' in the mix while we were at it.
I'd also decided I wanted to do a little drawing with the kids. I usually catch the kids programming on NHK3 on Sunday afternoons and they always do this really simplified line drawing which the kids at home can copy. And as I often just give them a colouring sheet, thought that if they could draw the picture first it would be so much more fun.
So, what has a long nose? Well of course it's an elephant. Should be easy to find instructions for drawing a simple line drawn elephant on the internet? Think again, 15 minutes later I'd seen hundreds of great elephants but all of them were way too difficult for my students to attempt.
So it was time to put together our guide to drawing a really easy carton type elephant that even your youngest students can manage:

Step 1:

Draw a big arch.

Step 2:

Create the feet and draw a line up to the mouth.

Step 3:

Draw the trunk

Step 4:

Add an ear.

Step 5:

Draw a dot for the eye and add the mouth.

Step 6:

Finish by drawing the tail.

You and your students should now have a perfectly good elephant for colouring or whatever you choose to do with it.

Here's the news quiz for this week. Of course the main story has been the sinking of a fishing boat by an Ageis destroyer two weeks ago...and the subsequent accusations etc of those in the line of command. How long can Defence Minister Ishiba hold out before he's forced to resign is anybody's guess.

For more stories happening in Japan that you can use with your students click on the links below:

Student Sheet(PDF 86KB)
Notes Sheet(PDF 134KB)

Today we celebrate Hina Matsuri in Japan. Typically families with young daughters will display sets of (very) expensive dolls. They'll also have some kind of celebration meal...

...but enough of that, because I want to tell you about the 3 CD's pictured above. It all happened about two weeks ago on a cold Saturday morning. I was checking the internet for some ideas to use in my real young learners classes when I was lead in the direction of a You Tube clip. The clip showed a rather energetic lady leading a group of kindergarten kids through a version of a Hello song. So what? I hear you ask.
Well the song was so catchy and packed full of actions that the kids couldn't help but move around and smile. I decided then that this was something that I needed to have in my classes. A quick web hop later to supersimplesongs.com and I was able to listen to short samples of all their songs.
Ordering couldn't have been simpler and a few days later the CDs arrived.
I'd pretty much given up on using music in the classroom as teaching the lyrics would usually seem to be too difficult or where a song had been adopted for an EFL setting it was mind numbingly dull (think Eric from kids NHK.) Well the songs that Devon and his team have put together manage to be simple and fun at the same time. I've just loved seeing our students smiling and laughing along to the them. And as they leave the class they're still singing!