It is the end of the term, exams are finished, kids are restless, teachers are restless, yet you still have one more lesson to do. What do you do?

 I like lessons to connect to something in the kids’ lives as much as possible and one thing kids are often interested in are global sporting events like the Olympics. Though Olympic Fever in Japan is not as strong this year with the Olympics being in Paris rather than Tokyo, people are still excited for it.  So when we asked our students what big sports event is happening this summer, they all said “The Olympics”

I have found that a simple way to get younger students using English related to the Olympics is through the use of pictograms. While the Tokyo pictograms were universally loved, I also really like the look of the Paris games pictograms.  They remind me of the design of the French card game Mille Bornes I used to play as a kid, though sometimes it takes a second or two to recognize what sports they represent.   This video shows how the pictograms reflects the sports they represent:

Our lesson utilizing pictograms for our first year junior high school students was quite simple. First, we created four matching worksheets with about 10 Olympic sports in English in the right column and in Japanese in the left column. We made four different sheets. We used the time that our students were working on the worksheets to check on their English notebooks. Students only needed to complete one worksheet but if they finished early, we gave them a different worksheet.  This was unintentional, as we didn’t explicitly tell students they could complete more than one worksheet, but it did give students differentiated levels of success while also giving everyone something to do while we completed the notebook check.

Once we completed the notebook check, we then started showing the pictograms from the Paris Olympics. We just needed to say “What’s this?” and encourage kids to yell out the answers. Since the students had the answers on their worksheets. they could go through what was on the worksheets to find the answer if they didn’t already know the English or couldn’t guess from the pictogram. Then using choral repetition, we had the students practice complete sentences using the sports.

Our students were quite into it. High level/highly motivated/more outgoing  students would yell out guesses and compete against each other without us having to create a formal competition.  Lower level/less motivated/less outgoing students had the opportunity to listen and hopefully guess on their own while getting to practice speaking and pronunciation through choral repetition.  

I felt it was a really nice way to end the semester with an activity that is not too difficult but connects English and our lessons to the larger world outside of the classroom. 

Header image -- Scholz qualifies in 200 meter run. Then wins!

This is the 10th year for me at Project Genius and the 10th year teaching at one of our client schools. I decided that this year we should hand out a formal syllabus for the first time to our students. 

Project Genius has two teachers at this school and we teach there two days a week. We teach the first-year junior high school students on one day and the second-year junior high school students on the other. We teach the same lesson to five different homerooms each day. Each homeroom is split between me and another Project Genius teacher, so we have a little less than 20 students in each lesson.

When I have taught at the tertiary level, either as a Teaching Assistant while at graduate school in the US or as an instructor at a college in Japan, I prepared or followed a syllabus and formally evaluated my students.  However, this was not the case in my earlier experience teaching at the primary and secondary level in Japan.  When I was on JET in the late 90s, I just attended lessons to support the JTE.  When I taught at elementary schools in Tokyo in the early 2000s, I was the T1, with the students' homeroom teacher there to support me. That was also the age of Yutari Kyoiku, and the goal of the classes was to give kids a good experience with English. That meant when I planned lessons, I was free to follow my own interests and the interests of the students. I was not supposed to worry about grades or evaluations at all.

When I started at my current school 10 years ago the Project Genius team at the school – we were both new that year – didn’t know until the day before they were due that we had to turn in grades. I had assumed until then it would be like my previous experiences at primary and secondary schools in Japan.  (This is one reason, by the way, I started the school info sheets. I ask everyone in our company to update periodically.) Since then, our team at the school has built-up a curriculum, including exams, presentations, and graded conversations. And, since we don’t use textbooks, we have students keep a notebook, in which they are asked to include all the worksheets we pass out over the year, to help them visualize and remember what they are learning. 

Since we teach at a private junior/senior high school which aims to get kids into top universities in Japan., exams, grades, and other formal evaluations are an essential part of the school culture. I just need to tell my students an activity will be graded and, given the opportunity to prepare on their own, students will practice and work hard in any individual class. Even so, I still feel that many students don’t see beyond a “one point English” view of our lessons and aren’t always thinking that our lessons build upon each other.

I decided that handing out a formal syllabus would be one way to address this. Recently I have been watching my fair share of US teacher TikToks to know that it isn’t just in beginning EFL classes in Japan where adolescents are told several times what to do by teachers and then promptly forget. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself or my students in terms of expectations, but giving students a formal, written document seems to be a good, time-tested approach to reinforce what we are telling them in class. I am also hopeful that teachers and parents are also able to gain more insight into what we are doing in the classroom, which not only shows the outside world what we are doing but also hopefully gives them the opportunity to encourage our students to participate more in our classes, as well.

Here is what we came up with for the first years and the second years.

So far this term I have been encouraged that providing and reminding students with more explicit expectations provides students with some safety, security, and courage when we ask them to take a jump into the English-speaking pond.

Header image -- Curriculum by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

I wanted to thank everyone at Project Genius for their hard work this year at their schools, especially considering the many difficulties the world has faced these past few years. I hope our team can enjoy their holidays, whether it is here in Japan or abroad.

For the last several years at the junior high school where I teach we do a crafts activity in the last class junior high school first grade class of the year. I am from California, so I never experienced a "White Christmas" until I came to Japan. The few instructions needed to explain how to make a snowflake using just a pair of scissors and a piece of paper (cut, triangle, fold) is well within our student's English ability. I am also pretty bad at crafts myself, so once students understand what to do they inevitably create much more elaborate snowflakes than I could even imagine.

And while the two instructors from Project Genius at my school are from the west coast of the US, our school's JET instructor from Australia. She described what having Christmas in Australia was like while also having our students listen to an Australian version of Jingle Bells.

I also learned some new words through this lesson, such as ute and swaggie.

We are also entering our recruiting season. If you are interested in working for us please check Craigslist or Gaijinpot for our latest openings or send us your resume directly via this form.

Please have a safe and enjoyable holiday season!

Links to materials and lesson plan below.

Lesson Plan

Model conversation and worksheet

Lesson Plan

Lesson in Workflowy