Harajuku Cafe

I found this cleaning out stuff on my computer.

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I just traveled to Fukuoka for the visa run and I met an Aussie at the airport. Nice enough guy living in a town I’d never heard of --but that’s not unusual; I don’t know too many towns—who had a gig teaching children. He’s had the requisite education and experience teaching adults but not children. I told him my model for teaching prepositions and I thought I should list it here.

This exercise is sooo money. I’ve only used it on kids between 10 and 12 years old so I don’t know the efficacy of it on older or younger kids. If anybody out there uses this for a year and has some results (or no results!) please drop me a line. The exercise follows.

Follow up:

Inform the children that the first part of class is Storytime. The kids have to tell a whole story in English. If they have no story to tell, they have to tell their lunchtime story. The lunchtime story is modeled like this:

Today at lunch I ate __________. I ate with my friends ________, _________, and _________. I ate at (time). I ate in _________________. Lunch was (adjective).

To prepare for this I had food translations prepared to give them the necessary vocabulary. Make a large list of dishes and food items, and prepare some worksheets for the children to bring home. Their parents will make sure they do them and give them quizzes with the scores reported to their parents. They’ll learn this vocabulary pretty quick. What you want to avoid are answers like “I ate meat.” You want them to say a dish, e.g. fried chicken and rice, sushi, bibimbap, chia gias –whatever-- and you want them to list whatever isn’t a dish, e.g. broccoli, ginger, snow peas, etc. A reasonable answer would be “I ate fried chicken and rice with some mixed vegetables –broccoli, onions, garlic, carrots, and cabbage.”

If you do this everyday, five days a week, an answer like this should appear within four to six weeks. Constant and immediate correction has to be done by miming and facial expressions. For example, if the student says “I ate my friend.” You respond with incredulity and mime eating one of the students. The correction comes with the exaggerated understanding face and repeating the model sentence with emphasis on the missing preposition “Oh, you mean ‘I ate WITH my friend.’”

After a few months, they’ll tire of telling what they had for lunch and they’ll start to deliver their own stories.

And that is the whole reason you became a language teacher, to give a new voice to a person.