English Club

Knowing I had to teach first thing unfortunately did not make getting up any easier. It was G.10 at 8.30am and after looking through the textbook I had planned to revise adjectives. But they either had not been taught many before or had forgotten them all. I was planning to do a mind map that was part my work and part theirs. Instead it ended up being mostly me. But this did give me a place to start from. I went through adjectives to describe appearance and then personality. It was strange though; they didn’t know or hadn’t heard of the word personality before, but they had characteristics. So I think in the future if they don’t understand a word I may have to become a thesaurus until I find a word that they know.

We then played the game ‘who am I’. I reshuffled the class so that it was a mix of boys and girls then split them into two teams. I got a volunteer, and played out an example where I gave the student a sticky note to put on their forehead, but it wasn’t sticky enough and it was too small. So following Aum’s suggestion I wrote the name of a character on the chalk board (I was covered in chalk from writing and rubbing out constantly by the end of the lesson) and then mimed what they had to do. The student managed to guess that the character was Harry Potter. I then got the teams to play against one another by describing the character to the guesser for their team and the first volunteer to guess correctly won the point for their team. I then had to say they needed to describe the character in English. This did lead to more noises and actions being used than English words. But they were at least participating and attempting to think in English. The most amusing moment was when I wrote Elsa on the board and some of the girls started singing ‘Let it Go’.

I had the rest of the day to plan English club and even though it was just on Hannah’s and my timetables, Eilidh and Kate also wanted to join in. After being told there are only 12 members of the English club we managed to plan some games. We were then told that only 6 of the students were in today. So we then adjusted the games to accommodate the new number of members. Ben wanted us to include one of the games we played at training in the hotel. So we altered the plan again. By 3.10pm I think we had gone through at least 4 or 5 different versions of the plan.

So only two members of English club attended, but we were with Japanese club as well so we had about 10 or more students there. We played the ‘hotel game’ first. We got everyone – including the ETAs and Aum – to write their favourite hobby, musician and food on 3 different slips of paper. The task was to find who the slips belonged to and to match as many people as possible before they run out. It was great fun and helped us to get to know the students a little better. The G11 students got the hang of this more than the G7 students. But I think they still enjoyed it. We then played ‘hot snail’ which is hot potato but with Hannah’s Gary the Snail instead.

This tested the students’ vocabulary and the time limit put them under pressure so they couldn’t stay quiet like some do in class. Some got out fairly quickly, but some were in the game longer than I (one of the students passed it to me a second before the timer ran out).

In our last hour before work ended we decided that we needed to take a trip to the shops. There was a seveneleven not too far away; we just had to cycle there. The only problem with that is that the cycle lanes by the school are for motocycles, mopeds, and very slow cars and can sometimes be obstructed by sitting dogs, people or vehicles. So after we refused to nominate someone to drive the principles car (!) the principle offered to drive for us. It was only a petrol station but I got the greatest choice of snacks: Pepsi, barbecue crisps, sour cream and onion crisps, more chocolate koalas and dried banana.  I’ll look forward to them this week.