We had a lot of fun in Saturday's Kinder class (年中～年長のクラス ) recreating scenes from the Potato Pals book, At the Store.

  While the internet is great resource for finding ideas and methodologies for teaching second languages to children, it's rare to find a page that sums things up so easily. Well, today I found such a page over on Smart Parent Advice. The actual website is geared towards parents and aims to, in their own words, "Provide Advice To Parents So They Can Raise Their Kids With Confidence!" but that's not to say that language teachers cannot learn a thing, or two, from their articles. 

 The actual page that caught my attention was 5 Tips For Helping Your Child Learn A New Language. To sum the page up briefly, the five tips were:

1. Make language learning fun

2. When the kids don’t feel like they’re doing difficult work, they’ll learn without even realizing!

3. Lead by example

4. Read to them as much as possible

5. If You Can’t Bring Your Kids to the Language, Bring the Language to Your Kids!

I wholeheartedly agree with all the points raised and if you are in the process of trying to teach your own children, or your children are learning a langauge at a language school, and you'd like to help them, I throughrouly recommend visiting the page to read more.

Aside from the linked page the rest of the website, smartparentadvice.com, is full of great ideas and advice for the new parent, or even the long-in-the-tooth language instructor such as myself!

I particularly liked their Simon Says page.

Nice work guys.

 This week in our adult classes I tried using this short news item from newsonjapan.com

 It's about Coca Cola Japan starting to offer a subscription service at its vending machines. The video is in Japanese so after using some lead-in questions to set the topic, the challenge to my students was tell me what it was about.

 We then discussed the pros and cons of various subscriptions.

 It was a good topic setter and because the news articles on newsinjapan.com are usually short,relevant and in English, I'll be looking to use more arcticles in my classes from now on.

  As part of our Kinder class (キンダークラス) text Potato Pals by Patrick Jackson and Rie KIimura, there's a section where we learn the phrase "I walk the dog."

  So what better chance than to give all the students their very own dog...not a real dog...but an invisible dog tethered to a dog lead!!

  Walkies!!  Sit!!  Jump!!  Lie down!!

  (Big thanks to Blackpool's Golden Mile in the 1980's for this idea!)