Page in Japanese

"When is your birthday?"
Months of the Year

Target English: Months of the year, "When is your birthday?"
Song: The "When is your birthday?" Song can be found in the Teacher's Set
And in the new curriculum Level.

In the classroom or at home ........

There are a lot of months, and they can be tricky to teach. But this song hopefully makes things a lot easier!

Teaching the months of the year is quite tricky as there a lot of them . One great idea is to take photos of the kids in each class who are born in each month and make these into picture cards, this really personalises the lesson.

The key with this song is that at first kids only learn their own birthday month. This is easy to do and as it's something that's important to each kid they learn it quickly. Then they gradually pick up the name's of the months of their friends birthdays.

The trick is to sing the song with everyone sitting, when it comes to each student's birthday they stand up and sing the month louder then sit back down. This works great!





The The Teacher's Set also has the new 1st, 2nd, 3rd song - great for "th" pronunciation!



Recommended Game

"Add 'em" is a great game to try here!



1- Divide the class into teams, call up the the first student from each team and have them stand back to back.
2 - Each students shows a number of fingers on one hand
3- When you say "go" the two students must turn to face each other.
4- The first student to correctly say the sum of the fingers shown by both hands is the winner.
For the months of the year version they have to say what the month is e.g. July if the total is 7 fingers!

Once you've done the demo like this, get all the kids to do it in pairs!

Other Games

I mentioned the Banana Tree Game above, but one really good game for larger groups is to do something like the "Where are you from? Worksheet Game".

This time all the kids do is write down the numbers 1-12 on a piece of paper.
You say "Go!" and they go round the class asking when everyone's birthday is.
If they hear a month, they can cross that number off their list.
Keep going until all 12 months are crossed off.
Sit down.

If there aren't enough people to do this well ( statistically you need a couple of hundred), you can periodically shout out "bonus time". The kids then all ask you "When is your birthday?" and you shout out a month that is not too popular, all the kids can cross this off their list.

Remember that if anyone speaks a language other than English they have to start with a fresh list from 1-12 with nothing crossed off!

Or you could try it where they have to see how many people from each month they can interview in a set time.

Bonus Printables



Explanation of the Months Cards
Months cards can be some of the trickiest cards to produce for an English lesson. Most people in Japan use Japanese based cards with Japanese festivals etc. But whilst that's fine for Japanese lessons, here we're supposed to be teaching "International Understanding" so I've tried to make them a lot more internationally themed, fun and having lots of hints to make them easy to remember!

January - New Year with Big Ben and fireworks over Sydney Harbour Bridge
February - Valentine's Day
March - New born lambs and rabbits, lots of green for St Patrick's Day
April - An April Fool!
May - a Maypole
June - "June Bride" ( it's great to tell the story of this phrase!)
July - 4th of July - American Independence Day
August - Summer Holidays ( Ozzies and Kiwis can explain the season differences!)
September - Back to School.
October - Hallowe'en
November - Thanksgiving Turkeys and UK Bonfire Night
December - Christmas



Worksheets: Place a pen on the sheet so the centre of the pen is over the centre of the circle. Everyone shouts out "When is your birthday?" One person spins the pen and if they can say "It's in �c." plus the name of the month that the pen is pointing to, they win a point! As with the "Good Morning!" game, either see who can get the most points in 2 minutes or play in a group and each time someone cannot say the month they are out, and see who is left at the end!
Instead of a pen, you could also try flicking a coin onto the sheet, if it lands on a month, and you can say it in English, you get a point!

Readers' Comments
by Stephanie

When I listened to it before my class, I thought the enka-type intro to the "When is your birthday" song was a little weird.  But when I used it in my class, it IMMEDIATELY grabbed the attention of my students!  They thought it was SO funny and have requested to do to the song again just because they like the intro so much.  Sometimes the stuff I think is the strangest ends up being what the students like the best, you really know what makes the kids genki!

Copyright (C) 1999/2023 by Richard Graham www.GenkiEnglish.com