Wednesday, February 21, 2007

僕の教え子は最高! ・ Man, I Love My Kids

English below...

昨日は○○小学校でH18年度の最後3・4年生の英語活動だった。お疲れ様僕 (笑)

この子供たち、特に4年生は本当にすごいです。英語の発音は綺麗だし、ちゃんとVやLやRができる様になっている。その上に、「I play ○○」、「I do ○○」と「I ○○」ができる様になった!たとえば、「What sports do you play?」(どんなスポーツをしますか?)と聞かれたら、「I play swimming」や「I play ski」じゃなくて、ちゃんと「I swim」や「I ski」や「I do kendo」!

中学生の教え子でもこれがまだ分かってない!

やっぱり僕の教え子は最高!

コメントは下 ・ ホーム ・ メール

=================================================

Yesterday was the last class of the school year for my 3rd & 4th graders at ○○ Elementary, and man, do these kids, especially the 4th graders continue to surprise me.

Not only is their pronunciation getting better all the time, i.e. they're actually beginning to be able to say their r's, l's and v's, they've actually started to pick up on verbs! For example, unlike most kids here in Happy Land, when you ask them, "What sports do you play?", they don't say odd things like, "I play swimming" or "I play ski", but rather, "I swim" or "I ski" or "I do kendo."!

My jr. high kids haven't even mastered this stuff yet!

Man, I love my kids. :)

4 comments:

  1. Way to go!!

    My Junior high kids for sure can't do it, but I only see my elem kids once a month. They are no where close. I suck...


    Nice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cool! Hmm I wonder why junior high school students find it so difficult... It's huge mystery, innit?

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's always great to teach kids, isn't it!?
    Cuz they just absorb new stuff like a sponge!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jennie...

    Don't get down on yourself! My base school is the one that these kids are at, so even if we don't have classes every week, I'm constantly around them, whether it's eating lunch together or just hanging out at recess. In other words, they have a lot more exposure to English than most Jr. High kids. Also, little kids tend to pick up things faster anyway.

    Hiromi...

    It's probably because of the way that it's taught. For example, if a teacher only teaches "play" & doesn't tell the kids at the very beginning that different verbs are used for different sports, those kids will consistently use "play", even with nouns like "skiing".

    The way that I did it was to introduce team sports first and focus on "What sports do you play?" and "I play ○○." along with games & songs. In the next class, after we reviewed the sports from last time, I introduced other non-team sports (skiing, snowboarding, ice skating & swimming). At first, similar to the previous class, I'd ask the kids "What sports do you play?" When they'd inevitably answer something along the lines of "I play swimming", I didn't initially correct them, but just made sort of a "Oh really? Is that so?" kind of face and kept going on.

    Once we got through the new words, I went back through and asked the kids if they noticed anything different about the new words and the team sports from last time. They eventually caught on to the fact that skiing, snowboarding, ice skating & swimming are more individual sports and I explained that because of this, they don't use play, but rather "I ○○."

    Finally, as I've always thought it was weird to say "I play Judo/Kendo/Karate", I taught them the verb "do". Once they got this down and realized that these 3 are originally Japanese sports they picked up "I do Judo/Kendo/Karate" right away.

    Kiki...

    Hey, welcome back!

    I totally agree w/ you that younger kids are a blast to teach. They're not dealing w/ hormones & going through puberty so if you can grab their attention long enough, their brains really are like sponges that just can't suck up enough!

    ReplyDelete