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The Great East Japan Earthquake that struck on March 11, 2011 directly impacted people living in Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate prefectures, but it affected people all over Japan. Over a period of about a year, I did a series of activities with my junior high school students related to the earthquake. Share the post “Lessons [...]
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My teaching History Hello. My name is Tomoe Wakui. Please call me Tomo. I am a high school English teacher in Niigata, Japan. I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself here in Teaching Village. Let me explain my teaching history briefly. I became an English teacher in 1989. I worked at [...]
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Committed to learning After 20 years in the EFL classroom, I still learn new things all the time. Certainly, here in Japan, the students are completely different than they were back in 1989; in those days, they all sat up straight, had their hair braided back and always made an effort (or pretended to, anyways) [...]
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Soon after I moved back to Japan, I had coffee with Kazu Nakamura, the new (at that time) president of Oxford University Press Japan. During our conversation, Kazu outlined his goals in regards to OUP’s educational mission. Part of the conversation, paraphrased in my memory, went like this: Kazu: I want us to provide teacher [...]
Bringing food topics into the language classroom is one way to stimulate language learning as well as hungry appetites. 9 and 10 year old students in the 5th grade of our elementary school in Japan take part in an 8-hour lesson on varieties of rice in Japan. This Japan-unit is later followed by a similar [...]
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This has been a very social disaster. I first heard about the quake on Twitter, and when friends started checking in, they did so on Facebook. Even when the phones and electricity stopped working, social networks carried on, largely because they could be accessed via mobile phones. It’s where people shared their stories–staying overnight with [...]
Like many people in Japan (at least those who still have electricity) I’ve been watching the news since yesterday, breathing a sigh of relief as each friend checks in or is found, and still worried about the many who have still not yet been heard from. Share the post “Aftershocks”FacebookTwitterGoogle+
In the US, they call it Duck Duck Goose. In Bulgaria they call it Pesek, while in Ghana they call it Antokyire. Children across the globe call it many different names, and in the Philippines we call it Iring-Iring. Iring is a Bisaya (Filipino vernacular) word for cat. Share the post “Cat and Mouse: Reinvention [...]
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I was in Okayama last weekend for the OUP Teaching Workshops. Okayama is famous for several things, including a story many of you know (at least in translation) and a food enjoyed by the main character in that story. Finding the name of the story and the name of the food is your webquest for [...]
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