Game   An active interest or pursuit, especially one involving competitive engagement or adherence to rules. Three Card Monte is a confidence trick that originates from the turn of the 15th century and is, ostensibly, an easy chance to make quick money. The dealer, or shill, in the local parlance, usually aided and…
 So you’ve finally made it through all the self-introductions and slightly awkward Q&A sessions with your new students. Congratulations! Now it’s time for the real fun to begin: you’re going to have to actually teach for real now. What a joy. For those of you feeling more or less paralyzed by fear and…
My first day of German II, my teacher announced that each time we asked, “How do you say ___?†we would lose one percent of our final grade. Gulp and heavy sighs. As a panic-stricken wave washed over us she pointed to a giant poster at the front of the room. It read “Circumlocution. 
– A Beginners Guide to Classroom Management  So it’s been a few months now and everybody seems to have fallen into a nice routine and the mystery and excitement of your arrival have finally worn off. Both for you and your students. No longer do they stare at you in silent wonder but instead…
This is a game board I made for a few my HS students. The aim of this game board is to make sentences with the verbs that the students land on. The players have to tell each other in which tense the sentence has to be. All you need is a dice and…
  As ALTs, we are regularly tasked with bringing native English and “fun†activities into the classroom. But how does one necessarily combine solid language teaching in a spirited environment that engages even your most apathetic students? Granted, there is no silver bullet, but I’ve found Total Physical Response (TPR) to be very effective…
Before the winter break, one of my JTEs approached me with an opportunity to do something really exciting with my 2nd year students (JHS, 13/14 year olds). It’s an opportunity that I honestly never expected. With the constant pressure the teachers always seem to be under to follow the textbooks as closely as they can,…
Those of you who teach in elementary school have probably already gotten your first taste of “Hi, Friends!†– the book they’re using to replace good ol’英語ノート(EIGO NOTO). Hi, Friends!, which in no way lends itself to funny mock-titles, is dragging my elementary school kicking and fighting into the 21st century. Because while the book…
Last school year I heard my vice-principal half-whispering to my principal: “Oh, Amanda? She can do it.” “It” was teaching two out of three junior high school grades without a JTE.   We had gone from three JTEs to two because of students-to-staff proportional downsizing, and it was just too many classes for them to teach. …