Christmas Lessons at Tsushima High

With exams finished, I had just enough time to teach a Christmas lesson to all my students before leaving for the break. After going all out for Halloween, I realized I'd set the bar pretty high going into Christmas. I wore a Santa hat in class, which got a much bigger reaction than I had expected.

We started with a discussion of Christmas accompanied by pictures. Like last year, I wanted to make it as much a discussion as possible, because turning the lights off to show pictures--no matter how pretty the pictures--makes Japanese students fall asleep just as quickly as it does American students. We began with the date of Christmas, followed by the reason for it. Surprisingly, most of the students knew the answer. As we went on to Christmas presents, Santa Claus, and Christmas trees, fewer and fewer students knew the answers.

Just like last year, all the students answered that they get presents next to their pillow. When asked where Santa puts presents in America, most of them answered "in socks!" When asked where Santa puts the big presents, only a few said "under the tree." I showed pictures to accompany all these--thanks to all the folks whose pictures of family Christmas trees are Googleable--and the universal reaction was shock at the number and size of the presents.

We then did a listening activity with a Christmas song. In groups of four, students listened to a song and arranged the supplied lyrics. For the lower-level classes, we did "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"--I'm pretty sure I used the Sinatra version; I don't know Sinatra's stuff very well--and for the higher-level classes, we used "All I Want for Christmas Is You." The first one was too easy; the second one worked much better, challenging everyone.

We ended by making Christmas cards. I supplied them with their choice of red, green, or yellow construction paper, coloring pages, markers, and crayons. All the students went wild with it. I taught some of them how to make paper snowflakes, and they loved it. I wrote a basic template on the board for them to use, with "Dear __," "Merry Christmas!" "Happy New Year!" etc. A few of the girls asked me to teach them how to write it in cursive. Thankfully their cursive came out much prettier than mine does.

Either because she just had an extra class, or because she genuinely wanted them to see me again, Masuda-sensei asked me to teach a Christmas lesson with the 2-2s, who we taught last year. It was great to see them again, and they were all much more talkative (in English!) than last year.

We did the same basic lesson with the third-years. I had an extra class with Kurokawa-sensei's 3-7s, so we decided to try teaching them a Christmas carol. He plays the guitar and sings, so he suggested John Lennon's "Happy Xmas." I could hardly believe he actually wanted to perform for the class, but he sat right in front and strummed along. We explained the meaning of the lyrics--and tried a quick footnote about rhyming--and had them sing along with us. The students seemed to enjoy it, but I get the feeling it was a lot more enjoyable for Kurokawa and me.

I also showed all my classes the video of the Nintendo 64 kid. They were amused, but I had to explain to several what a Nintendo 64 is. It's a fair sign you're getting older when you know of a Nintendo system that Japanese kids don't.