WINNING!

Not to sound like Charlie Sheen, but I was totally WINNING! at my eikaiwa (Thursday adult night) class last night.  I feel like I finally found my groove in that class.  Hurray!  I have three students in that class.  The first is an older lady who doesn’t know a lot of English and mostly speaks in Japanese.  The next is a lady who works in some shape or form for the BOE.  Although she is active in both my adult and children classes, I think she’s also there to make sure that I’m actually doing my job.  She’s really nice, and I’m glad that she’s there because she often acts as a go-between and translator if there’s a language barrier.  The last student is relatively new.  She’s a little younger than us, speaks English pretty well, and is really sweet.  Since April, I’ve tried a few different ways of communication in class, but the standard was to pick a topic, print out a handout with some questions about that topic, and answer the questions in class.  Conversation would generally stray off topic, but there were a lot of awkward pauses, and sometimes conversation was very strained.  I would have to make small talk……something that I’m not very good at. 

Therefore….I tried a new approach!!  One of my TEFL units mentioned turning everyday fun games into learning games.  Their examples were Pictionary, Monopoly, Scrabble, and Scattergories.  I.  Freaking.  Love.  Scattergories.  Why I never thought to play this game before is beyond me!!!  I used to play this game with my sister, Amanda, a lot, and my gosh…we were competitive with one another!!  We’d really stretch our answers with some of the categories and give answers that would get us double or triple the points just so that we could beat one another. 

Since I don’t have the actual game here in Japan, I created my own version of it.  I used simple categories like “food”, “foreign cities”, “boy’s name”, “five letter word”, “something in this room”, etc.  Then someone had to draw a letter.  Whatever letter we got, we had to think of a word that began with that letter for each category.  I didn’t explain the rule about doubling the points by coming up with a power word (for example: “food” with the letter C = chocolate chip cookies = 3 points) or that if two people have the same answer, the point doesn’t count.  Actually, we didn’t even keep score.  It was just fun to play! 

I set the timer for five minutes and told them to get as many categories as possible.  If they didn’t finish or couldn’t think of a word, it was fine.  I told them to just do their best!  ……and I was really surprised with the results!  It was difficult for them, but it was a GOOD challenge.  Everyone had a really good time!!!  Bonus: since I was playing with non-native speakers, it made me feel like a rock star.    Even though we weren’t keeping score, I was rocking out each round. 

We played three rounds of Scattergories before taking a break and changing games.  Next, I had prepared slips of paper with conversation starters on it.  For example, I had questions and fill-in-the-blanks such as “Who is your role model?” and “If I had 1,000,000,000 yen, I would….”  One by one, each person was required to answer the question that she chose.  Then we went around in the circle and answered that question.  Three questions that I found especially fun were:

1) “What is your favorite thing about Yunomae?”:  All responses had something to do with either the nice people or the scenery.

2) Responses to the “If I had 1,000,000,000 yen, I would…..” statement all revolved around traveling, so we all agreed that if one of us obtained 1,000,000,000 yen, she would take all of us on a trip around the world. 

3) “What is your favorite season?”: There were four people last night, and four different responses for this answer.  The oldest lady said winter, the other lady said fall, I said summer, and the other girl said spring.  Together we made the four seasons!

After that class, I seriously felt on top of the world!  I FINALLY figured out how to stimulate good conversation!  I’m saying goodbye to the little printouts with questions and hello to fun new games!  Scrabble, Apples to Apples, Kuma-gun version of Monopoly, and anything else that I can think of….watch out!  Here I come!