I teach an English class for the special needs children at my junior high about once a week. It’s not a duty too many ALTs I’ve met have to deal with on a regular basis and while it’s certainly fun it can also be really challenging. This year I have two students, a boy and a girl. I taught the girl last year and she only has a slight learning disability so I’m already pretty familiar with how to communicate with her. The boy on the other hand is new and necessitated hiring a second teacher to run his class, so it was already clear that he would present different problems. I haven’t asked about him yet, but it appears as though he has ADD. It’s very difficult to keep his attention and though he knows a little English, it’s always disjointed, making running a themed lesson pretty hard.
For my first lesson, I did the English alphabet. It seemed like a good place to start as I knew both students were at least a little familiar with it. Before we started, I introduced the warm-up activity I began last year, which includes five commands: stand up, sit down, spin, bow, and jump. It’s a really simple activity that can be expanded over the course of a year. For instance, after the lesson on numbers this week, I’ll start adding a number before some of the actions.
The start of the lesson was probably the most difficult part, though that’s true for a lot of classes. Mindlessly repeating things is just not too exciting an activity. Things picked up when we started playing games, though. First was karuta, which kept both of the students entertained enough to pay attention. Karuta, if I haven’t explained elsewhere, is a card game in Japan where something is read out loud, traditionally a poem, and players have to find and hit cards with corresponding lines. In English class, this is usually reduced to calling out letters, animals, subjects, etc. and having the students hit cards with those things on them. Whoever is fastest gets to keep the card and at the end of the game, I have them count how many they have and declare a winner. Both of the kids did really well, with Shiori barely coming out ahead.
Next, we played a game in which they could say up to three letters in alphabetical order and were trying to not be the person who says “z”. This game was a little more complicated and it became apparent that while Shiori understood the way it was played, Shouma was simply repeating what we asked him to do. All the same, he ended up winning two of the three games. Lastly, we did a connect-the-dot that used upper and lower case letters instead of numbers. When they finished, I asked them to write what animal they had drawn in English below the picture (it was a bird) and to write their names somewhere on the page. We finished class by coloring the picture.
It was a decent start to the year, but it wasn’t without problems. If I had one major complaint, it would be that the Japanese teachers did very little to help class along. I’m fine with planning the lesson, and in fact have a number of ideas at the ready, but the special needs class used to be among my favorites in no small part because the previous teacher was so open and friendly during class. She would always try her best to speak to me in English and joined in most of the games. With the current teachers, I feel like I’m putting them out just asking them to come over and help me explain something difficult to the kids. I still think I’ll have a good time teaching the class, but it’s not the same as it was.
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