The Second and Third Week

Oct.12
In my integrated skills class, I used “concentration.” This game is normally a card game but I used the technique for learning words. Students enjoyed learning words, so I think it was successful to do this. After the game, I took a lot of time for my students to write and perform a skit using words and phrases from a boring textbook. Everybody I met said that teaching test taking skills is boring because there is nothing much to do. So I decided to take sentences out of a boring textbook and had my students write dialogues. They enjoyed writing and performing them.

Oct. 13
I was caught in a traffic jam in the morning and spent two hours in the car before I got to my classroom.

Oct. 14
In the writing class, I used information gap and AB stories. The AB stories is a kind of dictoglos. Each student in a group reads a different story and tell what happens in the story to a member of the group. The member tells the story to another member and the story telling goes on until it comes back to the original storyteller. I guess I need to find easier and more interesting stories for the students.


Oct. 15
My daughter is at a difficult age. Accordingly I have to use time and energy to take care of her. It’s a tough job but I must endure. Today I watched Ragrats Movie 2 on DVD with my family. The setting is in a Japanese theme park in Paris! After watching, I wrote a test for my listening class. We use J-Talk as a textbook in my university.

Oct.17
I started using a new textbook in the writing class. It was a bit more difficult for my students than I had expected. I assigned a few pages as a homework.

Oct. 18
Today I started a poster writing project in my integrated skills class. Each group of students will read an article, write a poster, make an explanation about the article, take notes of another group’s performance, and turn the reports to me.

Oct. 19
Jos came to teach in Hojyo today, so we had a good conversation on many topics. In the evening, I played a game with my younger daughter while my wife and the elder daughter went to a dentist. The name of the game is UpWords that is from the same company that makes Scrabble. Oh, dear I was lost…. This is the first time I was ever beaten by my younger daughter in any games. This experience made me want to learn more about playing word games.

Oct.20
According to Cambridge Dictionary of American English, depress means to cause a person to feel unhappy and without hope. Everybody sometimes feels depressed when we meet a hardship or an evil remark. Let’s get rid of the depression and be happy. You can do it if you forgive the person who are angry at. During lunch, I was able to talk about the meaning of some technical words for teaching English:recast, feedback,and scaffold.