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…
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. …
No, seriously, we do spelling activities, and the kids get way more into it than I ever would have predicted. Here is how it happened. I’ll warn you now that this isn’t a tips-and-tricks kind of ESS for this month; this is a whole system that will take several weeks to get implemented, but will…
This is one of the best games I played with my students in three years (I played it each year!). I call it simply: The Ainu Game. In essence, it’s a True/False game played in teams of 5 or so students. (I just tell my kids to get into “lunch groups’ and they seem to know what to do!) …
(Printouts are at the bottom of the post) A while back, one of my elementary schools requested that I read some English picture books to my sixth graders. So I ran to the nearest Junkudo (an hour away) and picked up the three most interesting (but still simple) I could find from their small selection. …
(Printouts are at the bottom of the post) Question and Answer Daily Speaking Practice One of the greatest disasters of the Japanese English education system is the lack of speaking and listening practice. Â But with the ever looming “Entrance Exams,” it’s always a question of how? Students already have too much to memorize and not…