A rabbit talks!

 Koharu wrote about her favourite animal, and talked about it/recorded herself using an iPad app (chatterpix) - as you can hear, her pronunciation is very intelligible with intonation across longer uttereances under control, and word stress + individual sounds clearly enunciated. All of which should add up to success in a #younglearners #CEFR_A1 #CambridgeMovers speaking test

 

Our Amazing Picnics - after reading project from young learners

Reading is a crucial part for any language learners' path to vocabulary acquisition/activation, familiarity & flexibility with grammatical structures, coping with long texts, exploring new as well as familiar topics...and letting imaginations run away (a bit like the robot character does in this yarn when it gets supercharged by 'fantastic' lightning!).

This after reading project page, in an Oxford Read & Imagine level 2 graded reader (The Big Storm),  was all about personalising the background story to the adventure > going for a picnic. Sub-topics here recycle vocabulary sets of food (likes & dislikes), friends (physical descriptions), weather, places to go around town...we all love recycling language! (This is approx CEFR A1; 450 Headwords at this level, 689 words in this title)

As with all young learners, some love drawing & in Japan, have ninja-like skills - others (like me) have a complete phobia about blank drawing spaces and will produce the bare minimum as quickly as possible (and only after considerable cajoling!). NB This was not an arts/crafts lesson - rather, get us some content to work off, with the writing aspect my targetted outcome. (As with any open-ended task like this in my classroom in Japan, I try hard to minimise the use of erasers...a quick correction or fine tune is fine; rubbing out/erasing 20 minutes-worth of work & starting over is not!).

Regardless of artistic skills, we all needed encouragement to look back through the book to get 'more' ideas...and the same applied to finding the words we subsequently 'needed' to produce the written output. Importantly, don't cramp the artwork with this 'news' in advance (otherwise you'll end with carefully chosen/limited drawings!)...so then to find the words/structures we need to describe our work. From the story already (quizlet set of the glossary here by the way!)

 

Brit awards - What are they wearing? (Click Jan-Feb 2016)

Many of you may be aware of Mary Glasgow as a publisher, but have you ever heard of Mary Glasgow Magazines? The magazines cover all CEFR bands and targeted mainly for young learners. It is an excellent reading resource for current topics that are exciting and engaging for kids and teens. Plus a subscription comes with a mountain of online resources, videos, competitions, extra news and much, much more! We can't sing enough praise for the magazines at Luna and love using them with our students.

Here are a few videos (courtesy of the Sock Puppets app) Eleanor and Nanako made about what the stars at this year's Brit Awards are wearing in the January-February edition of Click magazine. Watch this space for more content involving Mary Glasgow Magazines!