It’s been a good 5 years since I started this blog and all this time I haven’t really said much about the lessons I do. Well, I’ve come across a warmer that is such a hit that I just had to share it with you.

Remember when you used to take school trips to far away places? What songs did you sing? If you were anything like me you would have sung the ever so wonderful song called ‘The Music Man’. Now with this plan you can share that experience with the cute little English learners you teach. I found it works best with elementary kids in the 5th and 6th year (so 10-12 year olds).

Preparation is minimal, you need a copy of the song as recorded by Black Lace (available on iTunes, or other sources) and a picture of a one man band (search google images for pictures, like this, or this). Also be aware that you only expect the kids to sing the chorus lines and not the lead.

And so….

1. Show the big picture of the one man band and ask the kids “Who is this?”.
2. Look at their bemused faces and tell them “It is a music man.”
3. Ask them, “How many instruments does he have?”
4. Elicit a few responses and then let them know the answer.
5. Tell them that we are going to sing the Music Man song.
6. Stick the picture to the board and tell them the first line, “I am The Music Man”.
7. Draw a picture of a house and the area around it, ask them what it is and then say the second line, “I come from down your way”.
8. Next draw a guy playing a recorder, ask the kids what it is and then say the third line, “And I can play”.
9. Then draw a question mark and say the fourth line “What can you play?”. This is the line you want the kids to say so drill it.
10. Then draw a Piano, ask what it is and tell them the line, “I can play the piano”.
11. Ask them what sound a piano makes, ignore any suggestion they give and go “Pia, Pia, Piano, Piano, Piano, Pia, Pia, Piano, Pia, Piano.” In the style of the song while making wild ‘playing piano’ gestures.
12. Get them to do it.
13. Repeat steps 11 to 13 for trombone (“Umpa, pa”) and Bagpipes (“Dur Dur”).
    

    Your board should look a bit like this, but your drawings will probably be better than mine.

14. Do a practice run of the first verse. Remember you sing lines 1-3 and 5 and to count down 3,2,1 for the kid’s line, “What can you play?”
15. Do it with the music (They may not be ready to sing their line 1st time, if this happens act all flustered and start it one more time).
16. Turn the music down and off after the bagpipes verse.

The beauty of this warmer is that if you have a set of three lessons with the same language point you can play it with the music the first two times but then can get them to suggest their own instruments and sounds for the third lesson.

Difficulties with this activity are that the second line “I come from down your way” is difficult to understand or teach, I tend to gloss over it a bit. Also bagpipes is a bit too British a reference for Japanese kids but if you are lucky at least one pupil in the class will know what they are. Just thank the lord that the verses where the music man can play Match Of The Day and Dambusters are much later in the song and can be ignored.

If the kids you teach are anything like mine, most will be giggling their little heads off but this song really is a hit. On Friday I got followed to the train station by three of my fifth year kids who demanded we sing it over and over. Even when we got to the station they weren’t tired or board with it and do you want to know the best bit…..?

Neither was I.

Winter has been especially unkind to me this year. I have had more than my fair share of little illnesses over the last couple of months and as a result I had to take a few sick days off work. I imagine this is a bit of a headache for the people who had to rejig my schedule at school. They work fast though and I received my revised timetable via email a few days later. It shocked me to open it up and see this, however.

Click it to view it nice and big and you can see it says, “Shaun took a rest”. Now, if this schedule had been written by a native English speaker I would be fairly insulted. I wasn’t so much having a rest, as coughing my guts out. I wasn’t so much swinging on a hammock slipping Martinis, as finding extremely painful to eat due to tonsillitis. This wasn’t written by a native speaker however and to understand why they accidentally insinuated that I was living it up, you have to look at what the schedular wrote in Japanese.

What is written on the Japanese schedule above basically translates to: “A section [of the schedule] was revised because Shaun Sensei was absent on 28th November“. Nobody is calling me a lazy bugger there. The word that is causing the trouble is 休む (yasumu). It means “to be absent” or “to go to bed” or “to retire” or “to suspend business” or “to take a day off” or…. or…. or….

To cut a long story short it can mean many many things. Just have a look at its definition in my dictionary…

What this little event here teaches us is that you have to be very careful when using a dictionary to translate something directly. While the meaning can be the same, the connotation is never mentioned, which can lead to many a misunderstanding. So be careful not to accidentally imply things about people when using your dictionaries.

Now if you excuse me I have to go yasumu now. I will leave it up to you to guess in what sense I mean that.

As I begin my second year as an AET, my mind begins to turn to matters of teaching and how to be a better teacher. One aspect of classes that always gets me is the warmer.

The theory behind the warmer is to get your students ready to start thinking in English mode and to get them hyped up for the lesson. In an elementary school this usually takes the form of a game or a song. The difficulty with warmers is striking a balance. If you find a game the kids like you have to be careful that you don’t let it completely engulf the rest of your lesson or that you don’t use it too many times, familiarity breeds contempt.

Songs tend to be more repeatable but you have to be careful with the older kids, they tend not to like the singing. I can vouch for this, being faced with a whole class of stone faced, frowning 6 graders just staring at you as you try to get them to sing If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands can put a bit of a dent into your enthusiasm.

One set of songs that I really found interesting though is Dansinglish. Only used in one of the schools I teach at, Dansinglish is used as a warmer for the entire of the third and forth year classes. In total there are 8 songs and over the course of 2 years they are taught to the kids.

For those who are not au fait with the lyrics here is a small example:

What’s your name?
My name is Masami.

Ouch!
Are you alright?

Let me try! Let me try!
This is fun.

That is a small part of the first song which is imaginatively titled Hello. Each line has a corresponding action, for example, Ouch! has you touching your head, while My name is Masami has you showing an imaginary name tag.

Thinking back, it was my very first day of work that I was confronted with this and my impressions were: This is rubbish. I didn’t know any of the dances, the kids didn’t seem to know any of the words and the only one who seemed to be getting anything out of it was the home room teacher.

Gradually though, over the course of the year I learnt the dances and the kids (mostly) learnt both the words and the actions. It became rather fun, I would genuinely look forward to doing it (especially with the 3rd years). It was a great opportunity to ham up the mimes and see if I could get the kids to do the stuff in the same over the top way.

By the end of the year I felt that most of the kids knew both the actions, the words in the songs and, most importantly, enjoyed it. However other than a bit of a laugh, what is the educational value of all this? Are the kids just parroting lines and not realising the meaning of their words or are they taking it all in?

I hope that with the actions they have a bit of context about what is going on and in similar situations would be able to repeat this language even if the usage or tense is not quite right. Next year I think I will test them by conspicuously banging my shin on a table yelling “OUCH!”, to see if I can get an “Are you alright?” out of them. I do hope though that the next time I go up to one of them and ask “What’s your name”, I’m not told “My name is Masami”.

That would be heartbreaking.

Unless their name actually is Masami, then that would be ok.

When I searched for this stuff on Google I was shocked to find the only mention of Dansinglish was on a forum where some teachers were moaning about it, but how could you not enjoy this:

This post has been a submission to the April 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri hosted by NihongoUp.

So there I was teaching my elementary school class about what a brown bear looks at when suddenly I was interrupted be some shaking of the ground and an announcement over the tannoy system telling the kids to get under their desks. The kids did this pretty quickly, a couple thought this would be a great occasion for a chat before getting shouted down by the home room teacher.

This process has happened a couple of times before, once for a minor quake, another for a drill, so I didn’t think too much of it. After about a minute it became clear that the ground wasn’t going to stop moving so I thought that was a good time to dive under the desk at the front of the class. I’m not sure how long I spent under there but as the stuff hanging from the walls began to fall down around me and the kids gave the odd shout all I could think of was how the earthquake simulation machine in London’s Natural History Museum had got the feeling of a quake spot on.

Eventually the quake died down and the kids all got up from under their desks and put their seat cushions on their heads. After this everyone filed to the playground and the whole thing appeared to be a bit like a fire drill from my youth. All the classes lined up while teachers took the register. What shocked me was that the kids were so calm about it all, I guess that they are well prepared for the situation. Eventually we were let back into the school and in the hall returning to class the first of many aftershocks took place, everyone was sitting on the floor quietly, for some reason there was a fish tank on a desk in the hall, I thought it best to hold on to it to stop it from falling.

So school was now officially finished for the day, parents had begun to gather at the gate and the kids could go home. I returned to the staff room and began to watch the footage of the tsunami on the TV, which was horrible, seeing live pictures seemed to make it even more real.

After sending a few messages out and about to my family and friends, my thoughts began to wonder to how I would get home. I work fairly far away from my home and we had received word that all the trains were out of action for the foreseeable future. Leaving the warmth of the staffroom at about 4.30 I noticed that the school had minimal damage, plaster from the walls and ceiling had fallen down in places and cracks had appeared in the walls. While walking to the train station I began to realise that all of the buildings around me had not suffered any lasting damage.

At the train station, it became apparent that the trains were not going to start up again for a while. I tried waiting for a taxi but none came and tried to work out a bus route using my phone but it was very difficult to sort out all the information and the bus signs were all in Japanese. So I had no option but to wait.

Fast forward an hour or so and we were finally able to get back on the trains. They ran them super slowly and only as far as the next main station. At this point I decided to get some dinner and try to chill out a bit. Later it seemed  like the trains would not start up again for a while so I decided to walk, there was nothing else I could think of doing. I followed other people in the vague direction of Seya, the road filled with cars and my journey was lit up by beacons of convenience stores, Japan’s backbone, amazingly still open and serving people.

Not properly knowing the area, I managed to walk passed Seya and ended up in Yamato after a couple of hours. I decided to wait for a cab from here but found a very large queue of like minded people had formed. I waited for a total of 2 and a half hours and was kind of shocked that nobody asked where anyone else was going. Rather than try to make groups of people heading in the same direction, people were entering the cabs individually and because taxis were only arriving once every 20 minutes or so, I thought this was a wee bit off.

After those 2 and a half hours of waiting I was still ten or so people away from the front of the queue but thankfully a man from the station let us know that the trains would be up and running soon. So I got on the train and waited.

I finally returned home at 12.30 am, about 8 hours after I left work.

Of course, this is nothing compared with what has happened to people in the north of the country, I’ve heard some terrible stories and seen some terrible pictures, I hope I can find some way to help them soon.

When I got home though, I felt like it would all be over for me. However continued aftershocks, problems with a nuclear power plant and power issues are causing stress. On Sunday it seemed like things were getting back to normal for the area but it proved to be a false dawn.

At the time of writing trains are not running to conserve power and while the schools are opening in the mornings, it is impossible for me to get to work. There will be scheduled 3 hour rolling power cuts starting from today, the first of these did not materialise however and the power company say they cannot say until a short time before they are scheduled whether they will take place or not.

I must say at this point that twitter has been amazing for getting news in English about what has been going on. The likes of @makiwi and @timeouttokyo have been brilliant getting information out to people. Reports say that there is a 70% chance of a large aftershock of about magnitude 7 happening in the next couple of days. I guess that nobody knows what will happen in the short term, everyone here is just taking it 1 day at a time.

I remember a long, long time ago, back in primary school, everyday I would eat a packed lunch. Wrapped inside a plastic box with the latest, greatest cartoon characters embossed on it were tasty selections such as sandwiches, crisps, an apple, some kind of drink and if I was really lucky, a chocolate bar. Now, I work in a primary school and have to eat lunch with the kids. Usually cooked lunches are served every day but since the end of the summer holidays the kitchen is in the process of being renovated. This means I have to bring in a packed lunch to school everyday to eat with the kids.

In Japan packed lunches are called bento. In general they are available in everything from disposable plastic containers to hand crafted lacquerware. For the school kids though, they too have reusable plastic boxes with cartoon characters on, however they are kind of different to their European counterparts. For a start they generally have 2 removable compartments, one for rice and one for other stuff. Also they have a pair of reusable chopsticks attached to them. In the ‘other stuff’ compartment there is generally a selection stuff like sausages, chicken, vegetables, omelette, fruit, seaweed or more rice.

The first time I came in to work after the summer holiday, I walked in with rather a shitty plastic bag full on food I picked up from the conbini that morning. The bag contained a pasta salad, an onigiri, some Jagariko (crisps basically) and some delicious Calpis. Come lunch time, I was not prepared from the reactions this got me:

“Oh, that’s not fair”, came the cries.
“I want some!”
“Can I have your Calpis? I’ll swap you my wheat tea!”

And that was just the teachers.

In all seriousness, the teachers told me that what I had was not lunch but just a load of snacks. The surprised looks of the kids around me showed me that having crisps for lunch was a very unusual thing for a meal. It seems that in Japan what constitutes a packed lunch is very fixed. Housewives will spend ages slaving away at the bento for their kids or husbands, trying to make them interesting. I guess that because you always more or less know what is going to be in there, so having a nice picture makes a difference.

I’ve seen kids with little characters in their bento made from cabbage, other vegetables made to look like flowers and even the word “LOVE” written in seaweed. Check these ones out too.

The main thing I’ve got from this is that while kids always get the same thing in their lunch boxes everyday they really just want something yummy. I wonder if I have inspired anyone to be a rebel and do the unthinkable and ask for something different from everyone else, something which they would rather eat.

I doubt it.

No one likes to be the odd one out and the simple act of bringing crisps as part of my lunch made me feel more of an outsider than anything else that has previously happened to me in Japan. Still, the upshot of all the strange looks, disbelieving expressions and giggling (that actually was from the teachers) has taught me many new expressions in Japanese.

One day, I think I’m going to bring a Kitkat into work, hide it and then put it on the table just as everyone is finishing their meals and observe the kids reactions. My only worry is who is going to clean up the mess after 30 kids heads simultaneously explode.