Lesson 1-3 The Third lesson - There are many Alphabetical letters around you! ... Eigo Noto Book 2 Lesson 1-3

It’s the third lesson for the Eigo Notebook and the kids are still on for the alphabet song. Now, they have gotten it all by heart, and even the last few English verses.

As a post activity to the song, we did another alphabet pairing activity just to “keep the kids on their toes.” There are maximum 40 kids in a Japanese elementary school classroom so that makes for 20 pairs, but there are 26 pairs in the pairing game, so it can get pretty competitive to make a second pair with those 12 (6x2) extra cards.

We then transferred back into the Eigo Note for the Alphabet Puzzle, nothing to difficult here. It took us about 3 minutes to complete the whole activity. Checking the answers with a set of your own A4 size pre-cut puzzle-flash-cards helps it go smoothly. If you number the left side and the right side cards 1-4 you can ask the students “Which card matches with 1?” while pointing to the left hand number they can tell you it’s number “2” and so on. Then you can ask them “What letter is this?” for each completed letter. I like to use these times as fluency conversations, meaning I ask the home room teacher not to translate my questions. Just put your emphasis on “number” and “letter” almost to the point of accent wherein you seem upset or surprised that they don’t know it. They’ll try harder at this point.

Moving on to Let’s Play 2, we got into the next mini exercise. Simple enough, and completed it in about 3 minutes.

I gave the students a verbal hint as they went along the three items. They already knew who the people are so it did not seem appropriate to lose time over it. What I did want to do was check how well they could explain either in simple English, non-Japanese expressions, gestures and sounds, who the people were, or why they were famous. You can get a lot of strange feedback from the students but I like to push their limits this way to try to get them not to quit communicating after a He… or She… Use whatever resources you have, is what I say.

I liked the next activity and this was the first time I had actually done this inside a classroom. It basically involves looking around the classroom for things written in English and transcribing your favorite items in your textbook. Hence the title of this post above, "There are many Alphabetical letters around you!"

An interesting idea for an activity and it makes me think, "How come I never thought about that before...?"

In private lessons students often take dictation, but this type of activity here gives the students a lot more freedom. My favorite item a student wrote down is “Choco Baby.”

They seemed to enjoy this exercise a lot and did their best not to make any errors since they had to present one word item on the board at the end.

After everyone got their one word on the board, I had the students read each word together as a class.

I stopped the routine only to ask for those strange words that students had written and asked them where they found it. Take a look at the pictures to see what I mean.

It was an interesting Eigo Note lesson. A memorable part for me was how one of the boys enthusiastically gestured on what Thomas Edison and Noguchi-san were famous for.

Hope your lesson went well!

The ENB

Eigo Note Book 2 Unit 2 Lesson 1...