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September 2004
Hello, I hope you had a nice holiday and welcome back to the new term!
After Olympics Games
Most of the excitement has died down now, but one great idea for lessons
for September is to go through a few Olympic highlights. This topic came
up on the discussion board last week ( http://genkienglish.net/discussion.mv ), and here are a few of my ideas!
*Do the "Grand Prix" game ( http://www.genkienglish.net/GrandPrix.htm ), but have print outs of some marathon runners as the game pieces ( make the heads bigger than the bodies for extra effect). You could even have that nutter guy run on and push a player back if they get a question badly wrong!
*For kids
who can read:
Print out a medals table ( see the official site) and give it to the kids
in groups. Then you ask questions like " How many silver medals did
China get?" . First team to answer wins. Numbers practice plus reading
practice ( even if they've never seen the countries written before they
can probably work them out).
*Medals Interview Game ( lots of prep but a good
game I think!) 1. Choose 6 of the top medal winning countries. 2. Put
the kids into 6 groups 3. Assign each group a country. 4. Give each kid
their own country's medal tally ( e.g. 2 golds, one bronze etc.)
5. Make "flag hats" for the kids, so they are wearing their country's
flag on their head. ( just print out the flag as A4 and attach some shoelaces
to tie it around the head). 6. Each kid also has a sheet that lists all 6 countries
down the left and has "gold, silver, bronze" along the top. 7. The kids have
to find one person from each country and interview them i.e. "How medals did you
get?". The other person answers. 8. You then write this number of medals
down on your sheet. 9. When you've interviewed someone from each country
you've won!
You could also increase the number of countries, e.g. the
top 30 countries so that everyone has to speak to everyone else! Maybe a little
too chaotic though!
*A basic colours lesson but add in
"Bronze, silver, gold"
* For sports names practice, print out the faces of the winners of all
the your country's medals and put them on the board, but with the picture
facing the board so the kids can't see. Just like the "jeopardy game"
( http://www.genkienglish.net/Jeopardy.htm ) the kids choose either "gold, silver or bronze" and a number.
You turn that person's card over, all the class asks "What sport do
you play?" and the kid ( or team ) who chose the card has to answer
what sport it is they play. Great for "I play ...(ball game)"
vs. " I do ... ( other sports).
New lesson plans with Photos!
One of the main things I wanted to achieve with the Genki English website was to have the games and lesson plans as easy to understand as possible. Hence why there are photographs of just about all the games in action. However the other week I realised that the description of the songs' lesson plans were all in text and not at all easy to understand! So I'm sorry about that, and to make amends I've now updated over 20 of the lesson plans with really easy to understand photos of the gestures and actions to most of the songs! It should make it really easy to understand what's going on. Many of them are linked from the front page at http://genkienglish.net/gamemenu.htm
On the Japanese version of the site I've also recorded narrations of many of the articles, great for showing Japanese teachers, have a look at those on the Japanese menu http://genkienglish.net/gamemenuj.htm
Need any classroom Japanese?
A big welcome to the nearly 2,000 new JET teachers in Japan. I'm sure you'll
have a fantastic year here! You'll probably find that most of your elementary
school teachers don't speak English at all, so some key Japanese phrases
will be essential to get your message across. Next month I'm hoping to
put on the site a "classroom Japanese" section, and if you have
any requests for words or phrases that you'd like to see on there, then
please let me know!
Summer was a crazy time holding workshops all over the place, it's great
to see so many schools now taking English seriously. This year is going
to be one very important year in Japan and the work you do now will have
a huge influence on how things turn out in the future! And as usual GenkiEnglish.com
is here to help you out, if you ever have any questions or problems then
please feel free to email me. I'm also going to be working on the new CD
5 in the next few weeks, and I'll also be travelling to many cities around
Japan, check to see if I'm near you on the Schedule page! http://genkienglish.net/oxford.htm
Enjoy the new term!
Be genki,
Richard
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Richard J. Graham
Primary School English Games, Songs and Activities
Email: newsletter@genkienglish.net
http://www.genkienglish.com
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"Even if you're on the right
track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
Will
Rogers
