This weekend for the English class I decided on a picnic theme - teaching about picnics and picnic words. the format of the class went like this:
Sing: Hello, hello
I'm a little teapot
Lesson: picnics and picnic foods
I showed crayon drawings of foods and was impressed with how some of the children were already familiar with some of the words, like "sandwich" "spoon" and "fork"
We did a little review where I tried to encourage each child to speak aloud, by giving them each a try with the cards, and asking them to "Please pass...." and saying "thank you" and having them say "you're welcome". They are very comfortable with basic niceties like thank you and you welcome, and I was hoping this would be a little confidence booster. Most of the kidlets are quite shy at speaking out loud until we loosen them up! Then we reversed it and I had them ask me to pass things.
Game: What did bear take?
I had my little puppet bear (from etsy.com by the way) steal something from the picnic scene and the children guess what it was that he took. For the most part, they were right on. :)
Songs: Two picnic songs I borrowed from a website called "Pete's Yakaberry".
The Picnic Basket (sung to the Mulberry Bush)
Here we go round the picnic basket
" " " "
" " " "
So early in the morning
Ants at the Picnic (sung to Skip to My Lou)
Ants at the picnic, what'll I do?
" " " "
" " " "
Guess I'll eat very quickly
Craft: had them color picnic foods on their own paper plate. I loved this part of it, just seeing what they would out on the plates. Lots of strawberries, grapes, bananas! Onigiri! (Mom always makes rice balls wrapped in seaweed and stuffs them with goodies for a picnic!). Adorable!! then I collected the plates just for kicks and went over each one with the English words of what they had drawn. It started out as a bit of review and time filler, but I noticed one very shy young boy who had refused to speak earlier, really brightened up when I showed his work. They liked having their art shown and discussed.
Story: Picnic, by Emily Arnold McCully. It was a very cute book. It was what they had at the base library.
Snack: I bought some cut up oranges, grapes and chips and we had a picnic on the floor. Usually Mio like to have them line up and get their snacks in an orderly manner, but I thought we'd get some speaking practice out of asking for each snack and saying please and thank you. This was cute.
Stickers! the ever loving stickers. This time ladybug stickers. It was what they had at the NEX. I think if I ever forgot the stickers we would have an international incident.
Anyway, I wrote in some detail this last class because I guess I'm feeling a little sentimental about getting ready to leave Japan and the class. This time we had a new teacher, Sarah, who is actually quite experienced in teaching and is going to take over after I, sniff sniff, leave.
After class I went home, had lunch with the boys, loafed out in the backyard with the dogs, popped open a Chu-hi (sho-chu and grapefuit, sold in cans at 7-11), and refused to act perky for several hours.