Ayumu Hirano - profile of a famous sportsperson

Ayumu Hirano is a professional snowboarder and skateboarder. He was born in Niigata on November 29th, 1998. He started snowboarding when he was four. His older brother also snowboarded & skateboarded, which inspired him. He became famous quickly, because of his high jumps and difficult tricks in the halfpipe.

He competed in the Sochi Winter Olympics when he was only fifteen and won a silver medal. He became one of the youngest medallists in Olympic snowboarding history. In 2018, he competed again at the Preong Chang Olympics and won another silver medal.

Besides the Olympics, he has won many medals at the X Games, which is a famous competition for extreme sports. He is know for performing very difficult tricks including the "triple cork" that only a few people can do.

In the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, he finally won a gold medal for the men's halfpipe. He competed in this year's World Cup, but he couldn't land well and was injured. However, he competed in the Olympics this month and finished in seventh place.

Posted for Renka

Story telling in the future tense - Predicting Gemma's future

As a final writing task after practising using 'will' & 'going to' for future predictions, I set up a creative writing task to make predictions about the futures of 4 high school friends, using the visual prompts on the worksheet to help them generate ideas. Do you agree with the examples of 'will' & 'going to' in these texts?

Gemma's future:

Gemma loves sports, especially snowboarding. In winter she goes snowboarding every weekend. Even in summer she does hard training for snowboarding.

She is going to get a snowboarding scholarship from a university. She is going to take part in a lot of games. She is going to win in some games.

She is going to be an Olympian of the Winter Olympics. She will get a bronze medal at first entry. She is going to be famous. In the next Winter Olympics she is going to get a silver medal. Just before her third entry in Winter Olympics, she will break her leg during practice.

Posted for Misako