Lesson 1-1 The very first lesson! “That’s right” Brush up on the alphabet! ...Eigo Noto Book 2 Lesson 1

The Eigo Note Textbook 2 begins with an intro into brushing up on the alphabet and how to pronounce their names.

The Grade 6 Eigo Notebook starts out with a simple but interesting alphabet search using a big picture of a town with various objects, stores, and people. The main point is to find all the letters from A-Z.

However, I started things a little differently this time. Since a few of my students have not yet memorized the alphabet perfectly, I thought it would be best to go through a quick review of the alphabet by writing the upper and lower case letters in order by hand on the board slowly enough to let all the students say in unison the letters as I write them on the board. It might be easier to just put up a poster and use a pointer but I like to shower as much English on the kids as I can and this way they can actually see how I write the letters (in Japanese it is called “kaku-jun,” I believe).

The next step was to practice singing the alphabet song a few times giving the kids a feeling for this new version from Eigo Note. Most of the kids thought it is a little fast, but after a few rounds of singing and helping them with the lyrics to the ending they were able to catch on to the rhythm. I guess if you are teaching kids who are a little slower to adapt you might want to look for a CD player with a speed and pitch controller. I have seen a few around the schools but I haven’t seen them lately.

Now it was time to get into the "letter finding activity" that is on pages 4 and 5. Rather than doing the letters in random, I opted to have my students look for them in alphabetical order just to give the a little purpose so they would be thinking “I’m looking for a G,” rather than just thinking “I found… something… I guess it’s a letter, isn’t it?” As a teacher, you could also prompt which letter to find by saying it out loud, but I think this process might be a bit slow and in Public Elementary School English in Japan, most of us are battling against time in a 45 minute lesson time frame. Anyway's, we pronounced the letters again as we checked the answers and their respective positions in the picture.

For the ending half of the lesson, we wanted to play a game of “karuta” the famous “card-getting game” of Japan. Unfortunately, the Eigo Notebook calls for cutting your own set of cards from a template in the back of the textbook. Although in my part I think it was a mistake to have the kids cut their own individual set. It would have went a lot faster if 5-6 students in a group had cut only one set of cards. Especially if you have students who are particular to detail, they will cut each card separately down to the fine line as straight as they can. I guess in the back of their minds they really appreciate having a textbook in the program.

So, we didn’t actually have time to play the game. Plus, I think it was a 40 minute lesson day, as well, so were really battling against time. But we’ve got good kids and nobody fretted too much about it. Plus they were still in a cheerful “back from vacation” mode. So, I’m sure the students still had a fine Eigo Notebook experience for this first lesson.

Hope your lesson went well!

The ENB

Eigo Note Book 2 Unit 1 Lesson 2...