Last normal lesson before graduation

After we finished the restaurant lesson, we only had enough time for one more lesson before final exams for the term. I decided to do the weather. The students here learn the weather in English from at least middle school, and practice it by being asked "How is the weather today?" when their English class begins. I even ask that of my elementary kids, and they get it with no problem. With that in mind, I was glad to have a lesson that wasn't focused on new material. I was able to build on the basics they've already learned.

Instead of using a dialogue, which I'd done for my other lessons, I decided to present two basic patterns and give the students different vocabulary to use with those patterns. Those two basic patterns were a question and an answer: "How is ~?" / "It's ~." The standard question, then, would be "How is the weather today?" with the standard response being "It's" followed by one of the adjectives they know. We reviewed sunny, cloudy, windy, snowy, and rainy, and I added stormy. I spent at least a little time with each class reviewing the roots of those words--sun, cloud, wind, snow, rain, and storm. With the help of the other teachers, I hoped to help prevent the students from ever saying "It's rain," something I'd heard in the halls a couple of times. It went pretty well. I gave the most advanced classes more food for thought, teaching them different ways of saying a few of them--It's rainy/It rains/It's raining, with "snow" and "storm" fitting there too. Though they gulped this down (my best two groups aren't remotely intimidated by English, which makes things so much easier), I didn't have enough time or gumption to teach them different verb forms for the other words: the sun shines, the wind blows, etc.

I also had them practice the past and future tense with the patterns--"How was ~?"/"How will ~ be?"/"It was ~"/"It will be ~"--which I don't really consider a new pattern, since they learned this a long time ago. That they're already familiar with this made practicing it so much easier. I would happily devote all my lessons to practicing old material instead of learning new stuff, if it meant the kids would grow more comfortable and confident with English.

After that, I decided to throw some new material into the mix by adding temperature to the lesson. That included temperature, high, low, degrees, and Celsius. When I asked the students what "temperature" means, about one student per class would get it right. Working from there, "high" and "low" took only a little bit of gesturing to convey. I'm proud to say I didn't use any Japanese to get the point across--though I knew the answer in Japanese, and figured out how to explain it in Japanese, I wanted to prove to myself as much as to everyone else that the kids could understand it in full English. "Degrees" worked more or less the same way, though we hit the same snag as with "dollars," involving plurals. The longer I spend immersed in a language that doesn't require subject-verb number agreement, the more I empathize with them in struggling to learn English.

I finished the lesson by using an honest-to-goodness Japanese extended weather forecast for question-and-answer fodder. We looked at it together to practice the patterns, and by the end I was asking students in turn to describe the weather on a certain day, eventually getting a full answer: "The high on Saturday will be twelve degrees Celsius." (This is why I taught some of them "It rains," though nobody ever really uses that tense--the past and future tenses are used a lot.) Even the worst class caught on pretty well by the end. I chalk this up to so much of the lesson being review--tenses, weather adjectives, even days of the week and numbers (for temperature readings).

Once I figured out how to spot the more astute students in each group, I would teach them a little extra. For example, I ended up teaching most of the classes "It will be ~ in the morning, but it will be ~ in the afternoon," also with the past tense option for describing yesterday's weather. They learned that without even slowing down, so I taught them how to omit the paralleled structure for simplicity's sake--"It was rainy in the morning, but sunny in the evening."

I even threw them a curveball by including 0 and negative temperatures on the forecast. Each student who was asked that question looked mortified, but every single one of them recovered and nailed the answer. Granted, the deck was sort of stacked--I asked the question of one of the better students in each class (not wanting to embarass a slower one), and I also had learned from the teachers that the Japanese word for the - is taken from "minus," so it sounds more or less the same. Still, it was for me a controlled experiment that allowed me to isolate how well the students would adapt and think on their feet.

I love these kids.