Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
I had intended to write about something completely different but I came across this video which I just had to post here. It’s a Japanese game show in which if you laugh, you get the cane. What do they laugh at? Well, although they try their best to keep quiet, it’s hard not to crack up when watching this guy try to speak English… If you can’t view the video, […]
Since I’m back to school tomorrow, I’ve been thinking again about my ESL lessons, and remembered an interesting moment from last term. I was getting frustrated with one of my kindergarten classes so right at the start of the lesson I told the children that if they crawl under the tables they will lose all their points. I usually give my kindy kids four points at the start of the […]
I was just looking around at the Japanese videos on youtube.com, and came across the following ‘English lesson’. I know we talk about using role-play to teach English, and how chants are a good way to remember phrases, but come on! This is just silly! I must confess that I’ve never seen anything quite like this on Japanese TV, but I guess it must exist. Maybe I’m not up early […]
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve broken the golden rule of teaching English to children by speaking Japanese! Heaven help me! I’ve started each lesson with a few minutes of chit-chat with the kids and I’m really enjoying it! I just ask them what they’ve been doing lately and they are really forthcoming in telling me their news. I learned that one of them has just had a baby […]
Imagine you have to commute home every night by train. The train is packed so you can’t sit down and you’ve already read the day’s newspaper. You forgot to bring a book and the batteries are dead in your walkman. It’s dark outside so you can’t stare out the windows and you’ve read the same advertising board a thousand times. What are you going to do? Study English, that’s what! […]
Earlier this year I started on ESL-Kids.com, a website that offers printable flashcards and worksheets for teachers like me – ESL teachers on the front lines everyday, faced with an army of children and only a few ABC cards to defend ourselves with. It was a slow start, but recently I’ve given ESL Kids a facelift, added a lot of new flashcard sets and made a worksheet generator. Just today […]
Yesterday was our Halloween barbeque, which was a lot of fun. One activity we did was set up boxes with pictures of fingers, brains, worms and eyeballs on them. Inside were sausages, prunes, noodles and peeled grapes, and the kids were really quick to figure that out. The adults tend to have a better imagination and pulled some really icky faces when dipping their hands in the boxes. Two of […]
I was looking through some of my old things and found a postcard from the first school I taught at in Japan. When a potential customer had taken a trial lesson, the teacher was supposed to fill in this postcard and it would be sent to that student. I had to shrink the picture a bit for the web, but if you look closely you’ll see a classic mistake. Â […]