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.