Injuries 1

Having just recovered from a nasty cold, I was feeling in the mood to do Injuries 1 with my next student. The lesson covers everything from injuries to common ailments so it’s fun to go through right before the cold and flu season, right when people will need these useful words and phrases the most.

When my student walked in, I realized just how much she really needed this lesson at the moment. It turns out that she was also suffering from a cold and had many of the accompanying symptoms. Before we even got into the lesson I was writing up vocab on the board that covered a runny nose, headache, sinuses, and sore throat. She’d also been running a fever the day before so I added that to the list. We then moved into the item with the matching of the flash cards. Since we’d done a bit of a warm-up on the vocabulary, it didn’t take her very long to match everything up. Then we went through the individual cards, making sure that she understood the meanings and how to use them in a sentence. For example, while she could say, “I have a cold,” she didn’t know that it was grammatically incorrect to say, “I have a dizzy.” I explained to her that cold was a noun whereas dizzy was an adjective and proceeded to put both into one more example sentence. After understanding the differences between the sentences, she automatically caught onto the pattern for making sentences with the rest of the cards.

Once we’d basically drilled the cards in thoroughly, we moved onto the role-play. Here, we took turns playing the role of doctor and patient in order to give advice. All sorts of injuries and illnesses came up along the way and she found it challenging to give advice for such things as broken legs and hangovers. But she gave it her best shot and has a wonderful imagination so she managed to get through the role of doctor quite well. She did a great job of describing symptoms as well when I took on the part of playing the doctor and asked her to tell me how she felt unwell.

With the item mastered, she was well prepared to move onto the review of Routine 5 – The Japan Sea. For a review, I phrased the questions to her in the future tense so that she was forced to imagine an appointment that she might have the following week. This proved to be a bit difficult because she kept forgetting to add ‘will’ into her sentences to indicate the future but she eventually got up to speed and started to answer with perfect sentences.

Having only the one point remaining, I told her that I hope that my throat will feel better tomorrow because it was still feeling pretty sore at that point. Then I asked her what she hoped for. Her mind was on a similar wavelength so she replied by saying, “I hope that my cold sore goes away tomorrow.” I hope so too!