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.

I have spoken before about packed lunches but not about the cooked lunches they serve at Japanese schools. Unlike in the UK, in Japanese schools everybody eats the same thing. The children collect the lunches from the kitchen and then dish it out and eat it in their classrooms. Once everyone has been served their food the class rep for the day reads a sheet given to all the classes containing a few facts about what they are eating.

These sheets of paper are delightfully named, Paku Paku Dayori. Paku paku is one of many Japanese onomatopoeic words which translates to the sound of chewing, while dayori means information. A serious translator may render this as Lunch Information but I prefer to call them Munch Munch Information sheets. These notes contain the menu, something about one particular piece of food being eaten and, this being Japan, a little mascot. Sometimes there is even a quiz.

While sitting down and trying to read the Munch Munch Information I have found that sometimes the way that Japanese classify and teach the children about food is very different to how it is done in the UK. For those interested, here are a few sample school meals that I’ve had recently and translated Munch Munch Information to go with them.

Lets put our hands together, yell Itadakimasu and tuck in.

Today’s menu:

• rice
• sesame seed soy sauce mix
• soup with fried tofu, shiitake mushrooms, carrots, sweet potatoes and daikon
• tuna ageni [Note: ageni is a Japanese style of cooking which first fries the meat and then boils it after]
• milk

Fish… Protein rich food which makes your body strong.

Fish is rich in protein which makes our bodies. Chiefly it works to grow muscle and produce blood. Also, because you can eat this fish’s bones, the calcium will make your bones, teeth and other things healthy. Today’s ageni is made from grilled and simmered tuna.

Quiz!

What colour group of food is fish?

1) Black 2) Red 3) Green

———-
Original Sheet

Wow! When I said that food is classified differently, I wasn’t joking. I guess that the quiz at the end is confusing you a bit. In Japanese schools food groups are classified into colours . In the original text it talks about food in the ‘red’ food group. My Japanese teacher tells me that the red group is basically food high in protein so I translated it all mention of it to ‘high protein food’ instead. I kept the question a more direct translation simply to fry (and then boil, much like tuna ageni) your brains.
———-

Today’s Menu:

• turmeric rice
• minestrone soup
• curry
• milk
• fruit salad

About spices

Every time spices are used they can add colour, smell and spiciness to cooking. Curry powder is an ingredient in today’s curry. In order to add things like sharpness, spiciness, yellow colour and a nice smell to curry powder many spices are mixed. The turmeric which is in turmeric rice is the source of curry power’s yellow colour.

———–
Original Sheet

This one was a bit more straight forward but for those who can read Japanese have a look at the last sentence on the original paper. After I read that, I thought the Japanese language had begun using some form of recursion.
———–

Today’s menu:

• Sliced bread
• spinach sauté
• chilli con carne
• milk

Spinach

There are dark coloured (high beta-carotine) vegetables and light coloured (low beta-carotine) vegetables. Spinach is a dark vegetable. High beta-carotine vegetables contain lots of carotine which makes things like your nose and throat healthy . Today the school lunch has high beta-carotine vegetables other than spinach in it, such as carrots.

———-
Original Sheet

Here was another example of different Japanese food terminology, referring to high beta-carotine vegetables as dark coloured and low beta-carotine as light coloured. I was also shocked that the Japanese words for high and low beta-carotine (which obviously I had to look up) were being written down willy-nilly on a sheet that 6-year-old Japanese kids are supposed to read. Hell, I had to check what that meant myself, I wonder if the little kids could get their heads around it.
———–

That was 3 days worth of Japanese school food, aren’t you just jealous of my tasty lunches?

In Japanese the verb to wear is rather more complicated than it needs to be. Rather than just having one word for wearing something on your body there are many words which depend on whereabouts you are wearing the clothing. Wear something on your head and you use 被る (kaburu), on your face use かける (kakeru), on your chest use 着る (kiru) and under the waist use 履く (haku). There may be others but I’m not aware of them.

It can be very hard to remember them when you need to use them in conversation, for the longest time I would just use kiru for everything and hope for the best. However in the elementary school I work in, I once asked a boy to put his shoes on. Or at least I thought I had. When he started trying to balance them on his shoulders, I realised that I should stop this practice.

For some reason it can be very difficult to commit these words to memory. Here is a tip to learn kakeru, the verb to wear (on one’s head). It requires a few bits of preparation but I assure you it is worth it.

First you must:

• Move to Japan.
• Get a job in an elementary school.
• Become short-sighted (or long-sighted).
• Regularly wear contact lenses.

After you have worked in the school for about a year, choose a day in which you will not wear your contacts but put on glasses instead. On this day the kids you teach will constantly come up to you and say (in Japanese) things such as, “Why are you wearing glasses?“, “You are wearing glasses!“, “I didn’t know you wore glasses!” and “Give me your glasses!“.

You will hear various conjugations of the word かける so many times it will be impossible not to commit to memory.

If you are not short-sighted try wearing an unusual thing on your face all day, like a big red nose or something. That will probably have the same effect.

Alternatively you could use Anki to make flash cards of the various forms of to wear and use that to learn them (the best thing about Anki is that you can use it to help you learn almost any word, unlike my tip above).

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.

On the Sunday immediately following the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan things seemed to be getting back to normal in Tokyo. The trains were running on time again and people were going about their business. While Tokyo and Yokohama had received quite a shake, there was very little permanent damage done to any of the buildings around here and we all counted ourselves very lucky.

Over the course of Sunday afternoon it became very clear that the situation developing at the Fukushima Daiichi was very serious indeed. Cutting a long story short, due to combined earthquake and tsunami damage this thing was pumping radiation out into the atmosphere. Almost immediately people living 20km around the nuclear power plant were evacuated. This led to many people wondering if the radiation would reach Tokyo in harmful levels. This spooked almost everybody and many people began to leave Tokyo for other cities in Japan or out of the country altogether.

As a result of the crisis at the power plant, suddenly the whole of the eastern side was seriously short on power. To combat this, the government announced widespread rolling blackouts and trains would begin running at a reduced rate all beginning on Monday.

On Monday I had to go to work.

This proved impossible as the trains where not running and so began a fruitless morning trying to contact my company for some kind of advice. This proved difficult because they were struggling to deal with everything too. Eventually an email did the rounds instructing us to go to our schools if we could make it to the door. Thus a stressful week ensued, I would have to wake up and the crack of dawn, check if the trains were available to get me to school and at least half way back again. It feels like I have done more walking these past few weeks than I have in a lifetime. Once at work I would try to entertain the kids and then trudge off home to be rewarded with a power cut when I finally arrived home. It also didn’t help that people had begun panic buying and hoarding of food. All to the back drop of the increasing problems in Fukushima.

Finally, on Tuesday, the board of education for Yokohama, possibly fearing liability for any complications that may result from all this, cancelled all assignments and effectively began the spring holidays early. This was a huge relief for me because it meant that I no longer had the extra travel stress to worry about. By this point I had read up a huge amount about the dangers of radiation and come to the conclusion (along with advice from the British embassy) that I was in no threat from the radiation. All I had to worry about now was the aftershocks.

Still the ground beneath our feet was disgruntled and perhaps once an hour there would be a mini tremor of some kind, all at various strengths. As I didn’t need to work any more, I decided to take a long weekend break to Kobe. The Kobe break was all very pleasant.

This leads me to the situation today, as I write this the status of the power plant appears to be improving. Despite this, levels of radiation unsafe to infants has been found in Tokyo’s water supply (which has since gone down). Aftershocks are still happening, usually in the morning so they replace the need for an alarm clock. News has come that the blackouts may continue until the end of summer and beyond. I recently collected iodine pills (just in case) from the embassy. Crucially though, news has also come in that the death toll in the north of the country has now exceeded 10,000 people.

Everything that has happened to me has been a mere inconvenience compared with what some people are going through. My heart goes out to them.

Barring any more crazy things happening normal service here on this blog will soon be resumed. Stay tuned for more trivial but fun thoughts from me from the land of the rising sun. A land which finally seems to be waking up to a new dawn.