To receive your own FREE monthly email newsletter, enter your email address below!
May 2004
Hello! Just for you, there's a brand new Genki English CD! And to celebrate
there is a load of new free stuff on the site....
New Genki Phonics CD
"Phonics" sounds quite complicated, but it's really simple. All
it means is that instead of learning the alphabet as "Ay" "Bee"
"See" , you learn the sounds that each letter makes. The idea
being that if you have all the basic sounds linked to the letters, you
can sound words out, like "d" "o" "g" to
figure out how to read the word. This is pretty much the same way that
many of us learned to read as children. It's also great for curing accents!
But when I was teaching I always found that traditional phonics needed
too much vocab to be useful. For example what use is "fox" as
an example of a sound if the kids have never heard it? I needed something
simpler, something fun, something that just focussed on the sounds themselves.
So I took all the energy and excitement of the famous Genki English songs
and made brand new ones just for phonics!
On this new CD there are 10 funky new Genki English songs, complete with
10 audio mini-lessons and games! Use them for 5, 10 minutes per lesson
and the kids will love it!
The Genki Phonics CD is available on June 1st, but if you already have
any of the other Genki English CDs, as a special "thank you"
you can pre-order the CD before June 1st and get post and packing for free!
Check out more details on the site: http://genkienglish.net/phonicscd.htm
People living outside
Japan will be able to order the CD by credit card when it's released on June
1st!
Upper Case or Lower Case
I always recommend teaching lower case letters before upper case letters.
Why? Have a look at this newsletter, how many upper case letters do you
see? Now count how many lower case ones there are!
Actually, do you know why there are upper and lower case letters? I found
this out from the very useful ETJ mailing list. Apparently the first people
who started using written letters were people who carved them on stone.
They needed big bold strokes which became the upper case letters of today.
Then people started writing on parchment. This parchment was very valuable,
so they needed smaller letters to save space. These became the lower case
letters. All very interesting!
In any case (no pun intended), it's conversation that comes first, then
when the kids have a grounding, try the new Genki Phonics songs along with
the new ......
Phonics Worksheets
To celebrate the launch of the new Genki Phonics CD, I've put up a load
of new worksheets, all free to use for anyone. There are very colourful
and "kawaii" ( cute in Japanese) A4 sheets for each of the lower
case letters, and then 10 new odd-one-out worksheets. There are already
loads of these about on the net, but hopefully the bright colours and cute
fonts will make the kids very genki!
To keep the "letters & sounds" theme going, if you're learning
Japanese (or know anyone who is!), I've also put up 4 new talking games
to learn the katakana alphabet on the www.GenkiJapan.net site. Using these
games you should be able to read katakana in a couple of hours, great for
reading menus in restaurants and making you a star amongst your friends!
There's also an article about the hints and tips I used to learn Japanese.
If you're quite advanced, or just starting, I'm sure you'll find lots of
useful information!
There's no game in the newsletter this month, but there'll be one next month! However there is another Kids Workbook to download from the "CD Owners Page" ( http://genkienglish.net/members.htm ), this time for CD volume 3. I'm also going to be looking at making CD
vol. 5, so if you have any ideas of themes you'd like to see, please get
in touch.
I hope to see you at the Kobe Recontracting Conference in June!
Richard J. Graham
Primary School English Games, Songs and Activities
Email: newsletter@genkienglish.net
http://www.genkienglish.com
=====================
