Lesson 3-4 The Fourth lesson - So really, when is your birthday? Can you say it?...

Can you write down your own birthday?

How to practice saying your birthday, Interviewing and Writing Down your Friends' Birthdays...

We got into the lesson after a short greeting and a little warm-up by singing the "Calendar Song." By this time the kids didn't seem to mind that we sang it accapela since they were already used to years of singing other songs accapela or karaoke style. It's nice having a group of kids that are so flexible. I hope they will remain this way even after the summer. Everyone in this business knows that all Grade 6 kids usually come back "different" after summer holidays. Well, yes, they grow up somewhat but let's not take that against them...

After the songs we did a little exercise from the book by writing in the first letters of the months. It was I think meant to be a little morale booster for the kids, but easy as it was, they went through it in a couple of minutes and I had a few of the kids write their answers on the board just to keep them a little bit involved since there was a bit of "silent" time there while they wrote in their answers. Also, I gave them a bit of a surprise about how we check work back home. You know, with a check mark and not with a circle as it is done in Japan. And a little comment that they might have seen it on TV before.

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Anyways, after that we went through a round of speaking practice of the ordinals first and then saying your birthday the long way with "My birthday is on ___?"

After we got into a really long group interview exercise of questions and answers of what you can see on the board below.

This was the main point of the lesson. Just to make sure the kids acquired the target language for themselves and and to enjoy a bit of free time using it. A lot of the kids didn't mind at all letting me record their answers and they seemed quite proud of themselves, too. Good for them! A few still needed some more practice but with a little coaching from me they improved quite a bit.

(It can be quite hard keeping everyone in top form as an assistant and it may come as a surprise if you readers out there didn't already know that the maximum number of students in a Japanese elementary school class can reach 40. That's right, 40! I couldn't believe it after reading some stats about class numbers in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany. And if you look them up you'll be in for a shock. Maybe the Japanese public will be in for the most shock of all, so I won't get into that right now. But 40 runs almost double from other countries' maximum number of students per class numbers that I've seen.)

Either way, have a good listen below if you have a few minutes to listen to kids practicing their birthdays in English:

To finish things off we ended the lesson with the stereo game.

Eigo Note Book 2 Unit 4 Lesson 1 ...is ready!...

 

Hope your lessons went well!

The ENB

Eigo Note Book 2 Unit 4 Lesson 3...