Whilst I was visiting Gaz’ town the other week he showed me lots of new minicards he’d made, including mini versions of the picture books and these mini cards for “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
They’re great for games, for example do the song then even something simple like…
1. Everyone asks one kid “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
2. This kid takes a card from the pack and answers with whatever is on the card.
3. Repeat from step 1 with a new kid.
4. To add tension, make one card a “magic card”, if this card appears everyone has to rush to the wall before being tagged!
It’s also the time of year again for you to make requests for new materials or picture books. Please leave your request in the comments below (comments are great aren’t they!) Some things I might already have ready to go and just haven’t put on the site yet, some others may take a little time, but for example here are some of the items from this year that all came about from your requests. I hope you find them useful!
Photo Real Flashcards
“The One” Card Games
The Vegetables Song
Printable Snakes & Ladders Games
“One page” Lesson Plans
40+ Spaghetti Worksheets
Islands Game Worksheets.
Printable Dice
So, what would you like this year, you know your kids better than I do, so get requesting away!
Earn More From Your Passion For Teaching English!
Personally id like to hear more of the Genki-hip-hop songs. I’ve used a couple of the easier ones where’s the… ? and How you doing? with my 5th and 6th grade with a great reception. They’re a pretty enthusiastic bunch anyway, it has to be said, but whereas they don’t really like the easier “childish” songs to much – the adult stuff goes down super-well!
I haven’t had much take up on the Hip Hop songs from teachers, which is a bit of shame because as you say the kids love them. But leave a few topics/grammar points you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do about making some new ones.
Especially if I can get an iphone to run beatmaker on!
One thing I would like to know your opinion about is “irregular verbs”.
I studied them: a list and just remember: go-went-gone, do-did-done,… It’s not the most creative thing in the world, but I kind of liked it because they have kind of rhythm, and once they got stuck, I found it easy choose the right one to use.
Anyway, it’s “out-of context-learning” so I would guess you won’t use this method. If not, what would you suggest to remember them. If “Okay”, I think this would definitely be a topic for a Hip Hop Song.
The other thing I’m recently having problems with:
When I ask the kids to introduce themselves including sentences of likes and dislikes or abilities…
They usually (of course) choose activities they are just into in school.
And many of these activities I don’t know the English word.
Guess I should get a better dictionary, but maybe you could make something into that direction.
Examples : “spin the top”, “kendama, karta, “and all those stuff they usually do around New Years,
then exercises on the horizontal bar this gives me a really hard time, because in Japanese it’s so easy “Tetsubou dekiru” so how can I make It as short and simple as possible. They also like to talk about the “Sakaagari” and other exercises.
Same with Jump rope: Ayatobi, Nijuutobi, …
And so on!
Here you go for irregular verbs: http://www.genkienglish.net/irregularverbs.htm
You’re right in thinking it’s not the usual style of learning that I like!
Good question about the other activities. I usually get them to try and think of an easier way of saying it, then try and translate that to English. But it doesn’t come out as something you’d particularly want to recommend as the definitive answer e.g. cup and ball game or something.
For the tetsubo stuff if it’s anything in the olympics it should have an official translation e.g.
http://park1.wakwak.com/~english/note/name-olympic-sport.html
Can anyone help with the examples? I know kendama must have an English expression because it’s originally French!
Richard –
Really? That sort of surprises me – just because Iv had such a great reception with them!
As for what, I think any of the slightly more advanced themes you already have would be good – just done in a slightly more adult “we`r-to-cool-for-kids-songs” way. In particular (Im going by what my curriculum asks me to teach the older kids!) I think an ordering food – like, an “at Mac-Donald’s/ fast food resturant”idea would work well, also maybe something for introducing someone to someone else? The latter im really not sure how you’d make it work, or really how useful to many people it`d be – really its something that im told to teach, rather than choose to. Again though, really I think anything that lends itself to this style of music would be brilliant!
The other thing that comes to mind is more Genki-disco TPR songs (moving away from the hip-hop now, but actually id LOVE to try a Genki Hip-hop TPR track!!). I do TPR every lesson, but done with the music always goes down better. Iv even seen the older kids (and teachers!) singing “sit-down-hands-up!” outside of class! I do however think that theres only so many times you can use one track.
Margit –
Translating “tetsubou” has always given me loads of trouble as well. Normally now i say “Gym bar” Gymnastics-bar was a bit of a mouthful! Explaining to people back home what it is is never easy either, mind! Ha ha.
Thanks a lot for these tips.
About Hip-Hop-Songs! It would be great if there were more.
I’m still working on the “whose…is this”. With some of the activities from Genki English the kids got it, but it would be great to have a song to get it stuck. Also the kids always forget so many things, so I would really use it a lot in classroom; concretely something like:
WHOSE PEN IS THIS? WHOSE ERASER IS THIS? WHOSE BOOK IS THIS? WHOSE RULER IS THIS?
IT’S MINE, NO MINE. (OR WHAT SO EVER/I’M NOT SURE ABOUT HOW MUCH TO PUT INTO ONE SONG HERE)
Moreover often forgotten items are CAP, JACKET,SOCKS (don’t know but they always want to take their socks of ) BAG
The idea with TPR Hip-Hop I also find great!
Thank you.
Oh! I completely forgot to mention the thing I actually had in mind when I mentioned the Hip-Hop request. Daily routines – It’s something that we – in Toda – are required to spend a fair amount of time on. I don’t think it really fits the younger targeted Genki themes, but for the 5th and 6th levels I think it’d be useful. I like the lost property idea too! It’d be useful in my school, for sure =D
Thanks again for the work you put in (and for being prepared to listen to requests!).
Margit (love that name!)
I read your earlier comment about trying to get the kids to say something they like outside of school in thier introduction. Well, at one school, I made an activity chart. I made one for “At School”,one for “At Home”, and one for “On Vacation” On the charts, I posted a picture of the activity and the present tense form. Each week or so, I added a new activity. Off those charts, I could teach any grammar structure or tense. I would ask kids to tell me about what they did in thier free time at home or what they did during the vacation break. They wound up being able to put together a 3-5 sentence short story with a picture. This was 6th grade level and I had been thier teacher for 4 years. I never tried it on new kids. I hope it works.
Picture Books – I would really love to see a weather story. (previously mentioned in the Forum)I tried really hard to find one whilst in the UK and there was nothing suitable.
Jobs would also be a great one. The children love “What do you do?” Locations such as hospitals, schools, farm etc could also be included for the vocabulary.
I would also love to see some more animations. My groups love the start of Doctor, Doctor and request it all the time. I dont know how realistic it is to ask for some animated type ideas for the text in the songs?? I would certainly love to have a DVD for the children to watch. Could the picture books become moving and talking books?? Expensive I imagine!
Irregular verbs – I have never looked at the hip hop pages and maybe they would work well with my older students. I will give the link to them to watch as I am sure it is more fun to listen to them in this format. Can I download this anywhere??
Hi Flossy,
I’ll see what I can come up with the new picture books!
Animations etc. would be cool to do and I do have a really good animator who can do some really cool stuff. But he’s expensive! The trick is making a new product that would sell well enough to cover the costs.
Do have a look at the hip hop songs, the mp3s are a paid for download and the game versions are all free on the site!
Sorry, im going to add yet anouther comment here. I don’t know if many people use the word-cards under the owner’s club section, but I use them all the time. Any chance of ones for the later CDs? The automatic card-generator is ok, but its hard to get something’s to fit well. Ha-ha, I realize how easy it is to make the same in word and how damn lazy it is to use them off the site – but damn its quick and easy, plus im a sucker for consistency!
I think you’ve got an eye for the niche materials here! They hadn’t been too popular, hence the lack of updates, but I’ll put them on the list for next week, they shouldn’t be too hard to do.
Ha-Ha, maybe. I’m my school full time, getting in at least one lesson a week with everybody – so i guess im pretty lucky to have lots of time to really play around with different things. I’ve found the word cards super useful though. Since i started using them (as opposed to long strips of paper that i wrote on by hand) my older grades have really gotten the hang of mix’n’ matching vocab. My handwritings terrible, too!
I used to find them really useful as well. I have been planning to research more about colour coding them to make sentence building easier. But I think that might have to wait for a while…