Tuesday Night Beginners: Food Activity

Tonight's class, both the beginners and advanced is going to be about food. The beginners will be doing an activity that they actually started last week, that you can see by following this link. FOOD ACTIVITY

I am working on making one activity per week for 52 weeks of the year for this class. I'll post them all on here and then comment on how they worked when I try them out myself.

I started making these activities, because I was just tired of being with the same group of people every week (these are really dedicated students), and I had done enough textbook stuff with them.

High Beginner to Low Intermediate Activity: Home

Just made a new activity public for teachers of high beginner to low intermediate learners to learn about homes.

My objective is to encourage learners to talk about homes and to generate their own vocabulary and grammar based on their language needs. I expect each person's needs will be different, so they can generate language to explain their own home, and to listen to others about theirs. This activity also assumes learners will be in Japan, but a teacher can easily overlook that feature.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWfQLUgmm2dyZGRqcndyNGdfMjM5NnBnOTZoaw&hl=en

experience knowledge imagination illust

This is a diagram that I came up with after a conversation with two different groups of people. The first group was my class of advanced English learners on Tuesday night. We were discussing how children are losing interest in science. One of the learners is also a high school science teacher, and he suggested that without knowledge, children cannot be imaginative. I suggested that without experience and knowledge, children cannot be imaginative.

The second group I spoke to was a group of people who were suggesting that I enroll my son in their private school. They were suggesting that public schools are inappropriate places for children to learn in. I replied that with the proper environment, with appropriate levels of experience and knowledge, children can be imaginative. The problem with formal education of late is that there is too great a focus on knowledge, because it's easy to quantify through testing. Bureaucracies like that, because then children can easily be slotted for easy management. Then they wonder why children lack imagination.

I do not rely on schools to educate my children. In fact, though schooling is mandatory, I am entirely responsible for my children's educational experience. School is just part of it. Their lives at home are far more important than their school life, and ensuring that they get plenty of experience, by playing with their friends, helping out on the farm, spending time abroad with their extended family, and expressing themselves in various media, I can make sure that their imaginations are healthy and active.

My students have the same needs, too, though I cannot ensure that they get what they need at home. Part of my task then is to make sure that part of their experience in my classes is experiential, so that their imaginations are stimulated.

Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe, Advanced ESL Activity

This is a list of questions for an advanced ESL Activity linked with Richard Dawkins TED talk on "Our 'queer' universe." I'll use this tonight in class and report on the class afterward.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html

1. Did you like science at school?
2. Did you like this talk?
3. What is evolution?
4. What do you think culture has to do with evolution?
5. Think of an experience when you were a child. How is that person different than the person that sits in your chair?
6. What kind of science is interesting to you?
7. Why are children losing interest in science?
8. What can we do to make it more interesting?

Advanced ESL class questions for J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure

J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure
http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination

commencement speech
stripping away the inessential
set free
failure inevitable
failure by default
value of imagination
Amnesty International
empathy vs. apath

Graduation

1. Can you remember your graduation day? Who spoke?
2. What were some things on your mind then? Do you remember?
3. How were some of these things realized or unrealized?
4. Do you still keep in contact with some of those friends?
5. Have you experienced anything you would classify as a failure?
6. How did that failure change your life?
7. Is failure inevitable?
8. What is the value of imagination? (morally neutral)