Journal Entry 1

On the first two Saturdays of each month I try my best to teach English at the Wakasa Gakken in Naha City. On this particular visit (Nov 4) I took the opportunity to try out the lesson plan (activity) from Ms. LaMontagne. The age group of this class is 7-11. Since we had a few new students this day, I decided to practice the one to one relationship with numbers only up to twelve. All the students know of this kind of matching activity and they call it shinkensuijaku. Today, I decided to use monkeys as the counting object (hoping we might have more fun than a barrel of monkeys). Although this activity appeared to be outside their ZPD, in that they could very easily recognize a multitude of monkeys up to twelve, it served as a valuable activity for pronunciation. The new students really did not have that much trouble with the activity other than needing the practice of making new sounds.