Catching up on last week.

Today's first lesson was enjoyable. This student and I have quite a long history so we were happy to see eachother again. We dispensed with the one point rather quickly since he demonstrated understanding easily and he had some things he wanted to tell me. I was happy to listen as a friend and at the sime time keep an ear out for possible mistakes or confusion on his part that i could help him out with later on. I always make a point to let students finish their thoughts completely in a natural flow. Then, once they have finished, put some example sentences up on the board for them to fix themselves. This way I can be sure I' ve drawn their attention to weak points in which they need to improve and at the same time I have given them a chance to express themselves in natural conversation without making them self conscious. Its all about building confidence.

While he told me about recent events in his life I made sure to toss out some questions from the Smith's School of English curriculum routines. He responded well.

After that I went through a "Let's Talk" article with him about relationships. It spurred some interesting extended conversation and questions on his part. We continued to go through the questions until there was no time left in the lesson. I introduced a new one point and asked him to prepare some examples for the next lesson. See you next week!

Newbie

My 8pm on Thursday was a basic level student who had only been here with Smith's School of English Kyobashi for 2 weeks. Before the class, I had chatted with the previous teacher and was told that the new student was a bit shy. I decided not to do anything too challenging and try to keep the atmosphere nice and friendly to him.

After greeting him in the lobby and offered him a nice cup of hot tea, I showed him to the classroom. I spent a few minutes introducing myself and getting him to talk about himself a bit, which I knew shouldn't be hard as he had done it with the other teacher in the very first trial lesson. As expected, he was relived and happy to use the sentence patterns and some new vocabulary he learned earlier to introduce himself. I gave him a big thumb-up after his introduction since the kid really did a great job applying what he learned from his trial here.

We then went over his previous one-point, and proceeded to the Routine part of the class. Since he had done routine 1 once, I thought it would be a good idea to review and consolidate. I also prepared some picture cards from Time 1 for him to string together "John's Day" using the stretching skill taught in routine 1.

I then introduced him to the item of the day, "ordinal numbers". This lesson is always good for basic level students because it provides a lot of activities and students get a lot of chances to practice. Once I wrote down some ordinal numbers on the board and listed the 3 major usages, it was time to put the knowledge in use. I pulled out the curriculum activity book and basically followed the practice and development part of the lesson plan.

By the end of the 45 minute-lesson, the shy new student was no where to be found, instead I found myself giving a one-point to this smiley chatty university boy! It surely felt good to be the teacher who improved the confidence of your students!

Question, question, who's got the question?

Today's second lesson was with a slightly higher level set of students. Three students in the lesson means there is basically unlimited chances for student to student interaction. I always make sure to take advantage of this to ensure a high student talk time and a low teacher talk time. Two of the three students share the same one point so I had 2 one point's to contend with total. By having each student come up with their own example for each of the one points we ended up with 6 nice example sentences that led to some additional questions by the students, and some nice opportunities for student to student questioning.

After that we moved on to a lesson on questions. This encouraged the students to ask questions of each other and of me as well. I made sure to keep my answers succinct so as to reduce teacher talk time. If hey wanted to know more about my answer they were welcome to ask further expansive questions all they wanted, but I wasn't going to give it away for free. They had to ask for it. I encouraged the students to give at least two statements in answer to any question asked of them. This pushed them beyond their normal safety zone of the short simple answer and into some new material. That's where the learning can occur.

The students had many questions for me about how to give the answers they wanted to. I encouraged them to try on their own, and then supported with board work when necessary. After that we reviewed some questions from from a Smith's School of English Routine and finished off with a new one point. Asking questions is hard to to so i was glad the students got so much practice with that skill today!

Hard core review.

Today's first lesson was with 2 very low level students. After going over the one points from the previous lesson and having each student practice the other's examples i asked them to practice some very basic, natural conversation about what they did last weekend. This exercise was a join review of the Past 1 Item and of the basic routine 1 questions. They used vocabulary that they had previously learned and I was able to guide them with questions that they were familiar with. It was a pretty strict exercise, I wanted to make sure they really understood what was being asked of them and how one would answer naturally. In the end we had a board full of nice example sentences that the students were able to then use in turn to describe not only the activity that brought up the example in the first place, but a myriad of other things they had done last weekend as well.

After a rigorous review I moved them into some new material. I don't normally recommend doing review before introducing new material, but the class just flowed that way today. I made sure to keep he introduction of the new item light in comparison to the previous activity. Always good to leave the lesson feeling light and unburdened. This portion was highly structured so the rules were very easy to follow. After showing a few examples the students caught right on and we had a blast.

We finished up with a new one point. Today I used "I have a lot/nothing in common with (A). For example, (B). I gave a few examples and asked the students to demonstrate understanding. Once I was satisfied that they understood I asked them to prepare some examples of their own for the next lesson and sent them on their merry way.

Long time no see.

Today I'm cover for another teacher who requested the day off so I'm here earlier than usual. The best news there is that I get to meet up with some students that I haven't seen in a long time. 2 students actually. They expressed that they were really surprised and happy to see me after such a long time. I felt good about that. After getting reacquainted a bit and calming down we did a review of last weeks one points. I like have each student take a shot at making an example sentence from the other students one point, even if they haven't seen it before. They usually get a pretty good idea from the example provided by the student who learned it in class last week. If not, I lend a hand.

After that went continued on to an Item which was perfect for pair work. They asked and answered each others questions while I listened to pronunciation or grammar errors. Once they seemed to have the hang of it, I added a few expansive questions so they could be more open ended in their answers. We also did some practice with the questions from routine 1 in order to give them a review.

This was a fun lesson and the time went by rather quickly since every one was in such high spirits. Before we knew it, it was already time for the one point! They came up with some examples on the spot which I was pleased about. I asked them to also come up with a new sentence for next week and bid them farewell. Hope to see them again soon!

Have a nice weekend!

My 5pm student today was probably one of the best English speakers here at Smith's School of English Kyobashi. He had double lessons scheduled today, since I knew his 6pm would be with 2 other students, I thought it might be a good idea to give him as much attention as possible for his one-to-one lesson with me.

As he walked in my classroom, I greeted him cheerfully and asked if he had any plans for the long weekend. His face lit up and happily told me that he would be going out with his girlfriend to Kyoto. Since I myself was planning on visiting Kyoto on Monday, I was eager to get some recommendations from a local. He was more than happy to share his previous trips in Kyoto and started telling me all the best spots for different seasons as well as his personal top 10 list of Kyoto shrines and gardens. From there we also had a great conversation about the similarities and differences in Chinese and Japanese temples, gardens and cultures.

It was fantastic to have such a enlightening conversation with a student and find out interesting information about Japan and Japanese culture, while at the same time, I did not forget that I was in the middle of an English lesson. He was almost fluent in English, but like many, he still made small grammatical mistakes. I jotted down 4 mistakes that he made during our conversation and pointed them out at the end of our class, which I thought he appreciated very much.

Well, I am going to take my student's advice and check out the Kyoto Botanical Gardens for the weekend then!

Recovery!

Today's first lesson was a huge relief to me. Why? Simply because the student showed up for his lesson. This student has been having an alarming amount of heart complications recently. When he doesn't show up for a lesson I know it's one of two things: He is in the hospital getting some sort of proceedure done or... I don't want to think about it. But, as I said he showed up to the lesson today and I was glad to see he was alright.

After checking his one point I decided to use some Smith's Routine questions to find out about his condition. As it turns out as of Monday this past week the treatment he had been undergoing finally resulted in a successful recovery! I was really glad to hear it. He had been going to the hospital nearly every day for emergencies but he told me it's been almost a week since he's needed to go. What a relief!

After the question and answer review we moved on to an item where we discussed bad habits using Gerunds and Infinitives. The mood of the lesson was extremely light and carefree. We had a lot of laughs. We finished off with a new one point and I bid him farewell. At the end of the lesson I said, "See you next week." He responded "Yup, see you then." I was glad that for the first time in weeks i could believe with out worry that he really will be here.

Questions

I started my afternoon shift with 2 lovely orange level students today. As usual, they were both right on time for the class and happy to be here at Smith's School of English Kyobashi.

After the pleasantries, I directed them to the board where I had written down their one-point from the previous lesson, "I am sick of... because...". It didn't take long for both of them to give me an example since both girls did their homework nicely. I then introduced the item of the day, an intermediate lesson "Questions". From their lesson reports, I knew both of them had done this particular lesson about half a year ago, and it always helps to review!

I first asked my students to tell me the "wh" question words that they knew, and wrote them down on the board one by one, and like most people, they forgot "how", which I then added to the list. Instead of following the lesson plan exactly, I decided to let these two be creative and ask each other questions using the "wh" words on the board. This went a lot better than I had expected. One of the girls started with a yes or no question "Will you visit a shrine on New Year's Day next year?", with a "Yes" from the other student, their dialogue just went on! By the end of it, I found out that one of them was taking a one-day bus trip to Shimane with her friends from work, and the other was visiting a local shrine with her family as she had done in the past 25 years!

We then moved on to the practice part of the item, where students were required to ask 3 types of questions to find out what animal card I was holding in my hands. After going through all the new vocabulary from the activity, the game began! It was great to see how much they both enjoyed this activity which probably reminded them of childhood memories, how excited they got when they guessed the right animal, and most importantly, they got to practise asking so many questions while having great fun!

It was definitely a lesson to remember for both me and my students.

A lesson in love.

Today's lesson was with two high level students. We started out with a review of their respective one points. I asked each student to demonstrate understanding of their own one point from the previous lesson, but of their partner's one point as well. It's a fun exercise.

For Today's item I used techniques learned in Smith's training to direct a guided conversation between the students. They talked about the pros and cons of meeting people on the internet and potentially dating them. This included their own personal opinions about the pros and cons of such a practice. It was interesting to listen to from my perspective and I was able to support their English practice with both grammar and vocabulary along the way. A question and answer session at the end wrapped this round up nicely.

After that I reviewed them on routine 8 by telling them a story in short bursts, then asking them to ask me questions to get me to continue the story. They didn't always use the questions I expected but as long as they were logical and grammatically correct it was alright.

At the end of the lesson I presented the one point, "I don't mind..." which brought up the difference between "I don't mind," and "I don't care." This kind of nuance can be tricky even for high level students. We didn't have enough time to break it down in great detail today so the students will prepare example sentences to be discussed at the beginning of their next lesson. Now they have something to look forward to!

Hobbies

It was a busy evening at Smith's School of English Kyobashi yesterday, and I started my evening with a class of 3 red and green level students.

Mr S had cancelled his classes the previous week for his painting exhibition, so I naturally asked him about his exhibition once all students settled down comfortably in their chairs. He was very excited about it and eagerly showed us many photos of the exhibition as well as his two paintings. We were all very surprised by the excellent work and the other two students had a lot of questions for Mr S, which was fantastic because at their level, the purpose of the class is for them to communicate with each other and with the teacher. Since painting was only one of Mr S's many hobbies, I had no problem getting Mr S to talk about his other hobbies, and the conversation went on smoothly to the different hobbies the other 2 students had.

We all had such a good time that I hated to bring the class to the end.

Abandoning the lesson plan.

Today's lesson was fun not only in the usual way, but also because the students pushed it in an unexpected direction. We were doing the Smith's School of English Item lesson, Frequency 1 when the students began asking extra questions about the word "almost". It can be a bit difficult to use since it is grammatically different from the Japanese equivalent.

We took turns creating example sentences with the appropriate pair word for almost. For example, almost always, never, anyone, no one, anywhere, nowhere, every time, every day, etc. The students were very interested and after a few examples they understood the concept quite well. They enjoyed making up their own examples and I was happy to see them demonstrate their understanding.

After that we went into a review of a routine and finished with a one point as usual. After the lesson I reflected on how pleasant it was to expect the lesson to go one way, and have it go in a completely different direction. I guess even when you plan the lesson you never can tell quite how it will go so it's go to be ready to flex!

Entertaining a foreigner

There are a significant number of high level students who have no problem expressing what they think or reading through a difficult piece of news material, but choke at it when asked to explain Okonomiyaki to a first-time foreign visitor in Osaka. This lesson is designed for such students.

My 6pm was a yellow level student who had exactly the same problem as mentioned earlier. So after we exchanged greetings and reviewed her previous one-point, I pulled out the thick chunk of Japanese word cards and explained to her what we were going to do. She recognized her own weakness as well, so when she saw the cards, she smiled and took a deep breath to get ready. Instead of asking her to match the English translations with the Japanese cards, from experience I knew it worked better if the student had to actually think of an appropriate translation for himself, and that was exactly what I asked my 6pm student to do. She went through the first few words without much trouble, and then came "takoyaki", "nabe", "yakitori", "anago" and "okonomiyaki". She laughed and joked that she wished she were not Japanese now. Anyway, instead of giving her the answer right away, I inspired her to come up with her translation by giving her hints and guiding her through the thinking process. This worked extremely well, by the end of the activity, she had no problem translating all the food cards into appropriate English, some were even better than the original ones, e.g. she described Okonomiyaki as a kind of Japanese pizza made from a mixture of finely cut cabbage, eggs, pork and flour, served on a hot plate with special sauce as well as seaweed and bonito fish flakes!

While it was the aim of this lesson to help her tackle with her weakness, I thought it would be too much if I spent the whole 45 minutes on it. After I complimented her on her great job of translating, I asked her what her favorite food was and any good restaurants that she'd recommend. Our conversation flew from there naturally and thanks to her, I now have a lot of good Nabe places to try out for the winter!

Used to

This is a lesson from the Build-up level, but as it only focuses on one grammar point and offers a lot of practice, I sometimes use it with pre-intermediate or intermediate level students. Mr T at 7pm tonight usually shares his class with 2 girls who are slightly lower than his level, but he was by himself this time and I decided to give him something that required a bit of extra effort.

After I checked his previous one-point, I introduced him to today's topic by writing down "Used to" on the board. Mr T nodded as if he knew exactly what it meant, so I asked him to give me an example. It was then that I realised that he had got it confused with "be used to". I then explained the difference to him, and gave him an example sentence using a pair of haircut cards, "she used to have short hair in high school, but now she has long hair". He understood the difference quickly and I moved on to let him match up the picture cards in pairs and make sentences out of them following my example. Mr T had to stop from time to time to ask me for help regarding new words and expressions, but other than that he had no problem finishing the task.

I then decided to make the lesson more personal and conversational, so I turned to page 122 of the build-up activity book and started asking Mr T "Did you used to..." questions. It was interesting to find out that he used to work part-time in college at a fish market which he absolutely hated because of the horrible smell and early hours, that he used to go diving a few times a year but had to cut back to once a year now because his wife was tightening the purse string, and that he used to work overtime a lot but since the new governor cut the city employees' salary, he was out of his office once the clock hit 5:30pm.

Our lesson finished with a one-point example from Mr T, " I am looking forward to diving in Okinawa next year".

Freedom vs. structure.

Today's first lesson interesting as usual. After exchanging greetings i set about checking the last lesson's one point with this man-to-man student. This student often brings in his own topics and since he pays for private lessons I'm happy to indulge these requests as long as they can be dealt with on the spot and in the period of a single lesson.

Today he wanted to discuss a movie he had recently seen. This was fortuitous since the Smith's School of English curriculum has a lesson specifically for talking about movies in the "Let's Talk" section. I was able to guide the conversation and encourage the student to talk about various aspects of the movie he saw using the handy set of questions from that lesson. The student probably didn't even realize he was being led through a lesson. More likely he thought he was talking freely about a topic he brought up while I asked for more details. I'm always glad when a student can feel such a sense of freedom in the lesson and still practice very specific conversational skills.

After a while all that freedom tired the student out a bit! So we moved into the review of an Item lesson. This was very structured and gave the student the chance to give concrete and correct answers in a controlled environment. This can be edifying in it's own was both for the student and myself.

As usual we wrapped up with a new one point phrase. Today I chose one from the A section; "I have no idea." Seems pretty useful to me!

Adjectives 2

Sometimes the students like to talk about their family or friends, depending on who they happened to be hanging out with on the weekend. But when it comes to describing the people that are very influential or important in their lives, they tend to clam up and become nervous. They aren't used to describing people, either their physical appearance or their character traits. So using adjectives 2 really helps them to create a vocabulary list that they can apply to everyone that they know.

Two of the students that regularly come to Smith's School of English Kyobashi together really enjoy learning English as a team. They've been coming here for probably as long as I've been here... if not longer. They know everything that there is to know about a best friend... except how to describe what that friend looks like. So we opened up the text to the adjectives 2 lesson after reviewing the one point and started in on the vocabulary. Most of the words were new or forgotten so we had some fun drawing pictures to identify with the unfamiliar vocab such as pointed, bald, and beard. Once they had a firm understanding of the vocab, I gave the simple sentences to play with while using a bunch of picture cards of faces to describe. We started off with simple sentences like, "He has a round face," or, "He is bald."

I then mixed up the cards and told the students that we'd be playing a 'Guess Who?' game. One student would describe a mystery man and the other would have to guess which character she was referring to. This went really well with the students taking turns giving as many clues as possible and the other guessing the right card.

At the end, I had the students describe their fathers one at a time while the other drew a picture of him. They both had a field day with this part, exhibiting the descriptive words and abilities that they'd absorbed, as well as their humorous drawing skills.

Questions

Regardless of the level, students always seem to have trouble with asking questions. Answering them is easy enough, but asking them kind of puts the student on the spot. In order to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling of trying to figure out what to ask and how to ask it, we spent a great deal of time practicing questions in the last lesson.

One of the students - a salaryman - has absolutely no problems answering questions but has a lot of difficulty asking them. One problem is that he has picked up a lot of slang from watching English movies and doesn't know what material is appropriate for usage and what should be left on the big screen. The other student is a bit lower in level and is completely unaccustomed to asking questions. So we would be going through the lesson slowly in order to build a solid foundation for asking questions.

We first started off with some simple questions like, "How are you?" and, "What is your favorite...?" The latter was especially useful since both students weren't familiar with the word 'favorite'. From there, we started to build onto the questions and change the tenses as the students became more comfortable. We eventually ended up with interesting questions like, "Where do you want to go for your next vacation?" and "Why are you studying English." By the end of the lesson, the students were both extremely happy to have some fun questions to ask in their next class at Smith's.

Prepostions

When I saw the names of the students in my 7pm schedule the other day, I had just the perfect lesson plan for them.

After we reviewed the one point from the previous lesson, I wrote down on the board " Where is the pencil?", placed my pencil under the lesson plan folder, and asked the question. Once I got the right answer, I moved on to write down the 12 commonly used prepositions on the white board, asked the two pink students to translate them into Japanese for me in order to check comprehension, and then proceeded to page 16 of the activity book, where students had to answer where the different cats were using the pre-taught prepositions.

Since they both had done this lesson once a year ago and they went through the first activity pretty easily, I decided to challenge them with practice 2, picture dictation. It turned out that this was their first time to do this activity, and when I explained what was required from them, they both looked very enthusiastic. We had great fun with drawing the pictures and I was surprised how good both of them were at drawing! Plus they got most of the prepositions right!!

I then moved on to the routine part of the lesson, did a review of shopping 1 with the two girls, and finished our class with a one-point: I prefer (a) to (b) because (c).

Getting ready for 9:00

My next student is coming in at 9:00 tonight so it's time to get a worthwhile lesson together for him. This student is man-to-man, which means he has reserved a private lesson so there will be no other students to contend with. The major plus to this arrangement is I can take time with the student's file and really tailor the lesson to that student's specific needs. Some times this could mean a very specialized field of discussion. In a group lesson this might be unfair to other students but in a man-to-man lesson the sky is the limit.

Fortunately planning a 45 minute lesson using the Smith's curriculum is a snap thanks to the intuitive system and training I received. I first check the student's file to find what one point the previous teacher gave the student at the end of his previous lesson. This is the same one point I'll start today's lesson with. Now I need to choose the main peice of material to provide for the student to practice on. Since he is a fairly high level student I'll take advantage of the Smith's curriculum material that is specifically tailored for higher level students. These are often open ended and can lead to interesting expansive answers from the student. This allows me to examine their natural speech and gives me a chance to identify and subsequently correct weak points specific to that student. I'll go with a phrasal verb card lesson since he hasn't had one in a while.

With the main portion of my lesson selected I just need to choose something to review and a new one point. Based on his file he practiced routine 7 recently. I'll give him a review of the questions to keep him fresh in using them. I plan on using the one point B 27, but I may decide to change it as the lesson progresses. Being familiar with the curriculum is my greatests asset since I can always change the plan to suit the students demonstrated needs as the lesson progresses.

Trip down memory lane

Today's lesson was a refreshing mix-up for the students and myself. We started out with a review of last weeks ones point as usual. These students all took my lesson last week so they came back with the same one point. We had fun going through each of the students' examples in detail and practicing in turn.

After that we launched into a full review of all basic routines from the Smith's School of English curriculum. Each student took turns going through using only the hint bar. I was pleased that they remembered most of the material very well. Review is of he utmost importance when it comes to English conversation.

Once we finished the review we began practicing the next step in the basic routines, routine 2. The initial stretch of this routine can be a bit challenging for students as it deals with the difference between "get on" and "ride" in English. Since these two words are commonly expressed using only a single word in Japanese the students had questions about usage. I provided some more contextual examples and let them come up with some of their own to account for comprehension. We finished off with a new one point and that ends another enjoyable lesson!

What ticks you off?

I had a group of green and red students tonight, they always had classes together and since they all knew each other very well, I decided to start our class with a bit of free conversation first, then move to the Let's talk unit: What ticks you off, and finish the lesson off with a one-point, B4.

Once everyone settled down comfortably in their seats, I initiated the conversation casually with a simple " so, anything new?" The guy at the end of the table smiled and said that nothing much happened recently, but he had taken a long trip to Thailand a couple of months before. Since I hadn't taught him for a while, he was quite happy to share his experience. The ladies were also glad because they both had been to Thailand and we had a really enjoyable conversation with everyone expressing their opinions and talking about their experiences in Samui Island, Phi Phi Island, Phuket and Bangkok. It must have been the best responses I had got from students for a while!

The main topic for today was a bit negative, but then again, it was also very helpful indeed to the students as everyone gushed the things/people that really ticked him/her off. Not surprisingly, what ticked the ladies off was the rude attitude from older Japanese men and the way they treated women as inferior, and what ticked the 30-years odd business guy was the incompetence of his boss!

Well, at least we finished our class with a very positive note: "I am looking forward to ...", and I was glad that everyone had something good to look forward to.

Past and present routines.

Today's lesson at Smith's School of English was with two low level students. We started out with their one points as usual. Since they had different one points we enjoyed practicing each one with each student. After that we moved into a review of an Item they had practiced previously: Past 1.

In order to practice the Item Past 1 we jumped right to the cool of section. I suggested the students ask each other about what they had done the previous day. Each student took three turns asking and answering about something they did. We had some chances for correction which we worked out together on the board. Good practice! Next we moved into the main part of today's lesson: the routine.


I gave them a chance to perform the first step of routine 1 (sentences 1-7) since they had seen it before. They were indeed due for a review of this material but as they practiced it i could see it was coming back to them. Once they were in the right mode we went on to practice the next set of sentences 8-14. After that it was just perfect timing to end the lesson with a one point. Today we did "I'm (not) familiar with this area. Useful!

Shopping 2

I prepared an item of passive voice for my 1pm students, but ended up just doing the routine of Shopping 2 as one of the two students didn't show up, and the usually quite one suddenly became rather talkative! In fact, I had to say that I was a bit surprised when she started telling me about her new purchase of a digital TV, her ideas about cable, optical fiber, sky perfect and her weekend adventure with her friends in Nagoya! It was so great that she actually wanted to share so many of her thoughts with me, keeping in mind for the past 4 weeks, her friend had been doing most of the talking in our classes.

Anyway, I thought this was a great opportunity to engage her as much as possible. So instead of following my lesson plan, I encouraged her to tell me as much as she could, giving her help from time to time with grammar and vocabulary. 25 minutes into the lesson, I had listed quite a long list of new words in the vocab box. I decided not to overwhelm her with this free conversation style and moved on to the routine part of the lesson.

She was an orange level student, but had done all the basic and pre-intermediate routines. So I thought we could try the easiest one of intermediate routines, shopping 2. As usual, I laid out the L shape on the board and we went through a coupe of new words pretty quickly. For the L&Q practice, I had to read the story a second time by her request, but she managed to answer all the questions without too many problems.

One point for the day, "I am looking forward to ...." She was meeting her friends for dinner, so there was our example!

Past 1

For the newer students who haven't much experience in English it's usually a good thing to stick to the basic lessons, especially for pink only students. One of the newest additions to Smith's School of English Kyobashi was one such student. So, knowing her level, I chose to do Basic 1 as her item.

We had to spend the first few minutes on her previous one point because she'd never reviewed one before and had totally forgotten it. After that was okay, we moved onto the one point.

Seeing as how her vocabulary is very low, we spent a great deal of time going over the new verbs that she was not familiar with. She reverted to Japanese quite often so I slowly built up her confidence until she felt better about trying to speak in English instead. Once she had all the verbs down, I double checked by going through some action pictures. She needed to identify verbs like swim, dance, and eat. Considering her level, she went through this part at a good rate. After that was done, we started to get into the simple past. Of course, this was all new to her so we frequently paused so that she could take notes. Eventually, she ended up with a nicely organized verb chart with simple and past tense. We went through the cards two more times with her answering in both tenses. From there, we had just enough time to create a few sentences in which she could practice the past tense.

The next lesson will be very useful in reviewing the past and present tense to reinforce her memory.

Frequency 1

I had a group of three pink level students last night, two of whom were a bit shy and always attended classes at the same time, and the other one was quite a bit more confident in speaking. I decided to focus our lesson time on Frequency.

The good thing about this lesson plan is that it is quite flexible, and there are loads of cards that can be used selectively for your class. As I had two shy students in the group, I decided to follow the presentation part of the lesson plan, but change the format slightly. Instead of asking students to write down the adverbs of frequency in different percentage brackets, I laid out on the desk the 100% card and the 0% card, always and never, and then asked them to pick out the best spot for the rest of the frequency adverb cards in my hand one by one. This way if they wanted to make a quick change or correct their mistakes, they could do it by themselves easily, without the embarrassment of having me red-marking or erasing their answers on the board.

Once the students familiarized themselves with the degrees of the adverbs and the pronunciation, I had them making short dialogues using the picture cards by asking " Do you ever....". Since this was the second time for them to do the frequency lesson, I didn't spend much time on this activity, instead I moved on to practice 2, which was much more challenging as it not only required students to come up with anwsers based on their real life, but also required students to carry on the conversation. While it seemed difficult for the two friends at the beginning, after 2 more examples from me and the more confident student, they got the hang of it and started really enjoying the small conversations. Before we all realised it, it was the end of our 45-minute class!

If... will

I was so glad to see the two ladies that showed up for tonight's class. I hadn't seen them in a while and we were all excited to do some catching up. We tend to have an interest in the same type of fashion so we spent a few minutes chatting about new hair styles and fall fashions before moving into the lesson.

They had absolutely no problems with their previous one point, "I've been looking forward to (a)," so we were able to get right into the item after a short review.

Setting out the flash cards, I got them started on matching up the If... Will pairs. Logically, they paired up the cards based on what they thought made up a good story. They compared ideas in Japanese with each other before confidently taking turns matching the cards up. Once they'd finished with that, I wrote up a sample sentence on the board, "If I exercise, I will lose weight." One lady changed the sentence to, "If I exercise, I will look beautiful," which was another great example. From there, they took turns going through all the cards and making up sentences to explain the scenarios in front of them. They'd done an excellent job with that so I figured that I'd challenge them a little with the next part.

I told them that now we'd be making up questions to ask each other by using, "What would you do if...?" My first question was, "What would you do if you had super powers?" They were really enthusiastic about answering a question which required them to use their imaginations. One student responded with, "If I had super powers, I would fly." For a little extra detail, I asked her where she would fly. The next student said that she would want to be able to see the future. But not too far. Half a year would be good enough for her to perhaps win the lottery.

Having gotten through the item while correcting grammatical errors and boosting the students' vocabulary, I shifted the focus to a review of the questions from Routine 1. And from there, we wrapped things up nicely with a new one point, "I can't stand (a) because (b)," that they would need to remember for next time.

How did it go in Tokyo?

When I walked in the school yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to find M, one of the students at former Horie school sitting on the couch waiting nervously for his first lesson here at Smith's School of Kyobashi. The relieved look on his face when I cheerfully greeted him was just priceless. He asked me if I would be teaching him and I assured him of that knowing the girls would have considered his situation and scheduled me as his teacher for the day.

Since I knew that M had been the only student in most of his classes at Horie, and that he had done almost everything in the curriculum at his level, I told him that the chance of having 1 or 2 classmates would be very high here at Kyobashi, and we would also have to do some review of the curriculum from basic level. He was very understanding and had no problem with my suggestion. Once that was out of the way, I decided to move to the lesson I prepared for him, simple past tense.

I first introduced the two basic categories of verbs in past tense by writing down two groups of verbs and then eliciting their past forms from M. He went through them pretty quickly with only a couple of minor mistakes. I then showed him the picture cards and asked him to make one sentence using a past time out of each card, e.g. "I ate sushi for dinner last night".

After we were done with this practice, I decided to ask him about his week in Tokyo as he told me earlier that he had an exhibition of his stained-glass works there. He was very happy and eager to share his experience with me, but in the process made quite a few mistakes with the tense and verbs. I corrected him only once in a while as I didn't want to discourage him, but I jotted down a few things that I thought were important and pointed them out to him afterwards, which he accepted appreciatively.

Just before the class ended, M mentioned that he had been a bit worried about changing to a new environment, but now he believed that he had made the right decision coming to Kyobashi.

Must / Have to

A lot of the students are not aware of the existence of must/have to, never mind knowing the difference between them, so this lesson comes as a bit of a shock to most of them. My last student this evening was no different. Before I even started the item, I asked her if she knew the difference and she answered me with a terrified, blank stare.

I started off by explaining the difference between must and have to to her. Must expresses a strong obligation or personal feeling whereas have to means that there are external obligations involved. I gave her the example of, "I must go to bed earlier because I'm always tired," and then, "I have to pay my bills," telling her that if I don't I'll get into trouble with my telephone company. She had a pretty good idea of must and have to by that point so we started to give examples for each, leading in with flash cards.

She did an excellent job of separating must and have to situations and was extremely happy to be able to express both with regards to her personal experiences.

Enjoying the past.

Today’s loop lesson revolved around basic Smith’s School of English routines and a review of the past 4 item which we covered together the previous week.

We started out by reviewing the previous week’s one point: Even if… The students had prepared their example sentences before coming into class. I was happy to see this level of commitment from the students. Each student told me their example sentences and I wrote them on the board in turn. I then highlighted or blanked out any mistaken words. Then the students fixed their errors together so we ended up with 3 nice example sentences using the one point “Even if…”

Next we began to practice the questions from the Smith’s School of English basic routines. They were familiar with the questions from practicing them previously but I wrote them up of the board to make sure the target material was clear to everyone. Then we practiced changing the questions from their standard present tense for to past tense. We then used the questions to ask each other various things about our recent holiday weekend including Culture Day. I let the students ask me a few questions first to get the ball rolling and then transitioned into letting them ask each other using the board to correct mistakes along the way. Good practice with lots of talking time.

We finished up the lesson with a low impact review of the Item lesson Past 4. Using the supplementary material students asked and answered questions with me listening and supporting when necessary. After that we wrapped up with a new one point. What a nice lesson!

Past 3

It’s always fun to get to know students by hearing about their past experiences and maybe learning a few interesting things about them that I never would’ve guessed before working on the Past 3 lesson. Past Participle is very difficult for a lot of students because they don’t usually use that form of the verb. They’re so used to relying on simple past tense that they just assume that it will fit into a past participle sentence without any problems.

When I started out the item with the students – two men and a woman – I first gave them the opportunity to use the flash cards to make up, “Have you ever?” questions. This only required them to fill in the blanks with what was on the flash cards so it wasn’t very difficult, but it did give them a chance to familiarize themselves with the sentence structure and verb tenses. After they were comfortable with this part, I moved onto a different set of flash cards that had the verbs in the simple present form. The students were then called upon to conjugate the verbs into the simple past and past participle form. While the simple past was fairly easy for them, except for a few tricky ones that they hesitated over, the past participle proved to be a lot more challenging. To make it easier for them, I wrote a chart up on the board with the verbs in question and filled in the ones that they didn’t know. After taking some notes, we took another look at the flash cards and the, “Have you ever?” question format. Now the students would need to ask the questions after having changed the verbs into the past participle format. After a bit of practice and some quick consultations with their notes, the students were able to smoothly ask each other questions like, “Have you ever ridden a scooter?” with but a short pause while they changed ‘ride’ to ‘ridden’ in their heads.

We did some more practice with the past participle by using the curriculum and some accompanying activities. With some time remaining, we played a truth or lie game that the students really enjoyed. The students took turn claiming to have done something (like eaten frog legs) and the others would have to guess if it was true or a lie. We kept score on the board and sometimes added a new verb to the list when one of the students would want to use a sentence with a verb that we hadn’t covered yet. This was a really great lesson for getting all of the students involved and for learning fun facts about each other.