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!