Spirit of the season.

Here at Smith's School of English we have students of all levels. They range from true beginners to confident vets looking to maintain their exposure to English. Today's lesson was with a set of particularly high level students. This means to me that the lesson could really go in a lot of unplanned directions. I always prepare a lesson regardless of student level but I'm always ready to abandon that lesson plan in the even that the students pull me in a different direction of interest.

With that in mind I started out by reviewing the one points from their previous lessons. This went smoothly and the students all came up with their own original phrases with only a bit of support from me. After this I moved into a review of some key questions from the Smith's routines. I facilitated this by asking them to discuss each others weekends and ask expansive questions of each other. Once they successfully demonstrated use of all the questions I had expected of them we moved into a discussion topic as an Item.

Not unexpectedly, something interesting came up in the course of discussing their weekends. One student remarked that she sees many Japanese customers buying Christmas presents at her shop and this struck her as odd since most Japanese people aren't practicing Christians. What an interesting topic! We went on to discuss what Christmas means to each student and what it means to them. We also discussed how they perceive Christmas not only in Japan but in western countries. They had lots of practice using English and had some pretty interesting stories to tell! Before I knew it we had finished the lesson and it was time for a new one point so we finished with that.