End of fall term and preparations for 冬休み

At the Japanese shrine prayer for nice healthy New Year for everyone.

                                  Probably also praying for it to not be so cold.
                                                       (P.C. Mom)

This past Wednesday I taught my last English class of the fall/winter trimester. In some ways I feel like this trimester has been the most successful yet from my time teaching here. I've been able to implement fun Western/American cultural activities and also participate in Japanese culture activities. Teachers and I are working well together which has me feeling really confident in class. However, I'm also extremely aware that in 3 months the Great Teacher Rotation/Musical Chairs:Teacher Edition will be taking place and therefore can not get too comfortable. The Japanese school system really does likes to keep you on your feet!
One of my favorite class activities that I did this trimester was teaching my students about Halloween and carving a proper American pumpkin in class! It was so cute to see how excited the kids were. They have never carved a pumpkin before let alone actually seen a pumpkin in real life. They were really impressed by the smell of the pumpkin and were in shock when I told them that the pumpkins we were carving would be considered relatively small by American standards of Halloween pumpkins. While we didn't learn/use much English during this class, it was a great way to teach my students a little more about me and to share some of my child hood memories.

The pumpkin that my 1st graders carved.

The pumpkin that my 2nd graders carved.

My most successful English class of this year may have been my last one, this past Wednesday.  In class we were reviewing the names of months and how to say numbers as dates (i.e. first vs. one). In our previous class together we had learned all of the months as well as the dates, and so this class we were just reviewing and applying the vocabulary to class activities to make sure that they retained the information and hopefully have it stored into the student's long-term memory. One of my greatest challenges with teaching this lesson was primarily in the students pronunciation. Many people think that pronunciation is a small/secondary trait in language acquisition. But as I have learned over the past year, if you do not correct them immediately they will continue to pronounce it wrong out of habit until it becomes so ingrained that teaching them the correct pronunciation is almost akin to teaching completely new words. And in some cases, the students cannot recognize the word when it is pronounced properly because they have become accustomed to remembering it with their own pronunciation or the katakana-ized version of English (that damn bastard language that defiles English learning in Japan; more on this in another post).
The problematic words for my students were months ending in ~ber and dates ending in ~th.. Instead of producing the brrrrrr sound my students would respond with a resounding baaaaa (i.e. Novem-ba, Septem-ba). And in the case of the "th" sound initially they would produce a suh sound,. like nineteen-suh and then they moved on to a ts .Nineteen-suh Ninteen-ts. So one of the goals I had set out for this final day of studying dates was to get my students to produce the TH sound. So as we started about with a quick run through of the dates and I made sure to over emphasize the th sound. December nineteenTTTH. To which my students cheerfully responded Decembaa Nineteents. I shake my head and say, listen carefully. NineteenTTTH not Ninteentsss. And I had them try again, to no avail. After a few more failed attempts I decided to switch my tactics and pronunciation a bit to see if it would produce closer results. So instead of emphasizing the (for lack of a better explanation) hissing sort of sound of th I changed it to a TH closer along the lines used when saying, The. And finally my students were able to produce a nineteen-th, twentie-th (they did over emphasize the TH sound, but at least it was a th and not a su or ts., so I can't really complain). Unfortunately, after moving on from review and into classroom application only a few of my students retained the newly learned information of saying TH and not ts or su. Which wasn't helped by the Japanese Homeroom Teacher whispering along fourtien(insert whatever date)-ts whenever the student would give answers during the activities. SMH. I'm still proud of my minor success.

In other news, I am getting ready to go on vacation for my winter break (冬休み）. I thought it might be fun to have a little trivia game for you to guess where I am going (if you don't know already). So throughout my vacation (whenever I have access to a computer or wireless #iphone) I will give you small hints either photos or random clues about my location. If I already told you where I am going don't ruin the fun!



Where in the World is Keri Going?
Hint 1: 
My travel time from Osaka, Japan to my winter vacation location (like that rhyme?) is a total of about 7 hours (not including the about 3 hour transfer wait time in Vietnam).