http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php http://www.englishpool.net/blog/interface/feed.png http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php Copyright 2012, No Author No Author en-US SPHPBLOG 0.4.8 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120519-133901 Breaking News site.

First we had Kentucky Fried Chicken being ordered to pay 8 million dollars in compensation to a young Australian girl who was left paralyised after sharing a Twister with her family. It was interesting to get the opinions of some of my medical students who said that salmonella poisoning couldn't lead to brain damage. As always it makes me very happy to learn something from my students.

Today we had the birthday of the sandwich. Apparently the sandwich is 250 years old this weekend. A big thank you to the Earl of Sandwich for inventing such a handy food (pun intended.) Although I would have to say that the strawberry and cream sandwiches on sale in convenience stores in Japan are beyond the pale! The only fruit that should be between bread must be of the jam variety such as strawberry jam sandwiches!

All this talk of food has lead to students asking where they can buy those classic British essentials of Marmite and Golden Syrup in Japan. Any ideas

For those looking to see what the Japanese feel about Marmite, watch this video:

]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120519-133901 No Author Sat, 19 May 2012 04:39:01 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=05&entry=entry120519-133901 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120517-094502 Shinjuku Kids Messe, a festival of children's activities available in Shinjuku.

I have volunteered to read some books, in English, to children aged 0-2 years old (and their mothers!) So I'm currently trying to decide which titles to read, of course they are going to need to be really simple and also available in a big book format.

I think I'm going to use the Beautiful Butterfly and one of the stories from Oxford Reading Tree. As the Oxford Reading Tree big books are only available in packs of six titles I'm still undecided as to which title to use. We've ordered them from englishbooks and they'll be with us at the weekend, as always great service from the team at englishbooks.

The book reading event on June 3rd takes place at the Cosmic Center in Shinjuku. We are allowed to display a poster and chirashi, so it will be a good opportunity to promote both englishpool and our book lending service, eigonohondana. I'll also be having a little practice next Monday at yuttorino.]]> General http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120517-094502 No Author Thu, 17 May 2012 00:45:02 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=05&entry=entry120517-094502 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120511-103331


English: An International Approach by Rachel Redford and from Oxford University Press contains ten units chock full of great content. Unit 1, Water, Water, has taken us to the Cholistan Desert in Pakistan, Carisbrooke Castle on The Isle of Wight, the water wheels of Hama in Syria (this also generated a discussion about the current situation in Syria) and to Bangladesh. It's shaping up to be a great course and what's more I'm really enjoying teaching from this coursebook.]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120511-103331 No Author Fri, 11 May 2012 01:33:31 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=05&entry=entry120511-103331 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120510-113637

Here's a simple butterfly craft for very young learners.

We have been using Mikiko Nakamoto's A Beautiful Butterfly book for a couple of weeks in our 'beans' class. It's a great book for introducing colours and food items and as with most of her books there's a lot of repetition for the children to get into to e.g. 'Yum, yum, yum. It's good!'

While don't often use craft in the 'beans' class as they are still too young (2 years old) it's great to occasionally introduce something really simple. For the butterfly craft we pre-cut a large piece of book covering film (sticky backed plastic?) into a butterfly shape and using black construction paper cut and stuck a body and antennae, we then put the backing paper back on. In the lesson we had the children rip up various coloured origami paper and then after removing the backing paper had then stick bits to the butterfly.

It looked quite messy, all those little bits of ripped paper everywhere, but once the children had finished sticking bits on I picked up all the bits using the areas of the butterfly that were still sticky!



]]> Beans http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120510-113637 No Author Thu, 10 May 2012 02:36:37 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=05&entry=entry120510-113637 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120507-111016

...but what have they got to do with an English class?

Last week at the start of an upper elementary level class, one of girls complained, in Japanese, that her shoulder hurt. As always when I catch them using Japanese for things that are easy to say in English, I had them name different body parts that may hurt as in "My hand hurts." etc. When it got to hiza the two girls both said 'kneeza' instead of knees, stressing the 'za' sound.

The root of this problem is from the Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes song, universally used in teaching English and probably the most recognised English song after Happy Birthday. Whilst the song is great for teaching body parts it does have the problem that many children are left thinking that knees are called kneeza in English. As it's a song that is played to death, I don't use it so often in my young learner classes, but when I do I tend not to say the 'and' parts. I prefer to just sound out 'knees' and 'toes'.

Back to the two fifth grade girls and their 'kneeza'; they were so sure it was kneeza, just like the cheesy snack, Cheeza. So we played hangman to find that word in between the 'knees' and 'toes'. They were shocked to discover it was a very simple 'and' and that they had misunderstood it for so long.

I must stress that both students came to me in the early elementary stage...and that I don't think I've ever used the Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes song in an elementary class!!

Any other misheard lyrics you know of?



]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120507-111016 No Author Mon, 07 May 2012 02:10:16 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=05&entry=entry120507-111016 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120426-181320
We have it running on a aging computer running Windows XP, and in order to keep the computer up to speed I often run the disk clean-up and defrag tools. Last week I tried Trendmicros system tuning, which is bundled with their anti-virus software. As part of the tuning you can delete programs from starting up with the system. I noticed a file called snpstd which didn't have an owner; thinking it looked suspicious I deleted it.

It didn't seem to have any effect and the computer worked without problems throughout the day. It was the next morning when I tried to open the Koha program that my troubles began. Intranet and Opac just wouldn't respond. I then realised that snpstd was a file connected with the Koha system. I was pulling my hair out trying to get koha to start up again, even though I make weekly back-ups I was reluctant to reinstall Koha from scratch; after a quick search in Trendmicro's system tuning program I found that I could roll the system back to the previous morning and restore any settings that had been changed.

So the moral of this story is DO NOT delete the snpstd file from the list of start up programs!

Oh, and by the way I still love Koha. It has really served us well these past three years, and while it may be looking a little dated, as a system it does everything we need. I would really like to install Koha 3 but although it seems it may be possible to install on a windows machine, I don't have the time to play around trying.]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120426-181320 No Author Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:13:20 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=04&entry=entry120426-181320 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120419-075723
As you may know picture books, or ehon, are very popular in Japan and not just with children but also adults. In order to satisfy this demand there are numerous shops selling both new and used picture books.

Our first stop was Kainokotori, a small used book shop in Shimo-ochiai, a few minutes walk from Mejiro JR station. It may be small but every wall space was filled with picture books. While most of the books were Japanese there were quite a few English books. They also had a range of mostly European wooden toys and games.

The second shop we visited Ehon House, turned out to be a hidden gem. Well the shop itself wasn't hidden as it's very easy to find on Mejiro Street close to the junction with Meiji Road but the choice of English language picture books was fantastic. There were so many books I wanted to buy, and I could have spent a day or two searching through their shelves.

Unfortunately we didn't have much time so we just picked up this little curio:



It's called My Granny's Purse and comes with numerous bit and pieces such as keys, spectacles, old letters etc.
]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120419-075723 No Author Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:57:23 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=04&entry=entry120419-075723 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120412-074624
Hopefully things will settle down from now. What I do know that with the choice of coursebooks and the experience in using them, we can look forward to a great year for learning English.

This year yoroshiku onegaishimasu.]]> General http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120412-074624 No Author Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:46:24 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=04&entry=entry120412-074624 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120407-150543

This was a craft I created to finish off the Three Little Pigs theme we ran with in March. For many students it was the end of Sprouts classes before moving up to the Kinder stage, so I thought I'd send them all home with a game they could play with mum or dad.

We've had a lot of fun in the Sprouts classes over the past two years and now we have a basic structure in place I'm looking forward to using our creativity to further improve the course and keep it fresh.]]> http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120407-150543 No Author Sat, 07 Apr 2012 06:05:43 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=04&entry=entry120407-150543 http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120313-102026

Next week, Tuesday 20th March, we'll be holding our final event of the school year.

The them for this party is a Tea Party (nothing at all to do with The Tea Party movement in the USA!!) So we plan to make Cup Cakes, or Fairy Cakes as I call them. We'll then decorate them and eventually eat them with cups of tea.

This year I've decided to change the format of the parties and have excluded parents and siblings. It got to stage last year, with the Halloween and Christmas parties, where I felt the parties were too teacher centered; basically because we'd have a classroom of people that needed entertaining. I feel that by restricting the parties to only students, we'll know who we are dealing with and we'll be able to give them a better experience, a kind of extended lesson if you like.

Hopefully everything will go well and I'll be posted some pictures of the parties next week.

Tea Party Poster



]]> General http://www.englishpool.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry120313-102026 No Author Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:20:26 GMT http://www.englishpool.net/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=03&entry=entry120313-102026