special needs students
Yesterday I went to the last elementary school where I had to introduce myself - I've now been in contact with all the schools, although I've yet to teach some children at one of them. This school is FAR away and behind scary mountain road that takes at least 20 minutes to get through - really, truly, horrifyingly scary mountain roads (and I grew up in Appalachia!).
I remember vaguely before coming here hearing about how the Japanese tend to treat special-needs people, and how it differs from America. I don't know where this impression came from, but for some reason I was anticipating not-so-friendly attitudes towards special-needs people. I don't know if this is typical of all public Japanese school systems, but I'm really pleasantly surprised and pleased at what I've seen so far in my schools. In 2 of my elementary schools there are 2 special-needs students - one physically handicapped in a wheelchair, the other physically and mentally handicapped with her own special instructor. Any of that supposed ostricizing I've heard about doesn't happen in my town, because the town's board of education is clearly able to meet the needs of these students. The first student - who I haven't been able to talk to directly yet, but I hear she's quite smart - basically is a member of her class like everyone else, while the other student is treated well by the other teachers in the school, although her needs demand more attention that can usually be given in a regular classroom. I can only judge by what I've seen, since no one can tell me the extent of these students' handicaps, but the treatment I've seen them get in their schools makes me almost envious, that Americans could provide for every special-needs student as well as my small town has been able to provide for the special-needs students here. But like I said, this is only the case in my own town - I've no way of knowing how Japanese schools nationwide treat other special-needs students.
Today in the junior high I was asked during first period to prepare fun activities for the advanced 3rd year students for fourth period. Other than my self-intro, I've never really done the planning for a full class at the junior high level, so I was in a bit of a panic. I ended up making a quick trip back home to pick up some materials to use.
Basically, my plan was this: have one activity to divide the students into teams, then have a series of competitions and at the end of the period the team with the most points wins. It kinda-sorta worked.
For the first thing - getting them into teams - I took a few newspaper comic strips I had cut out from my English newspaper and saved, copied them, and then gave them to the kids to find the rest of their teammates. The strips (2 Calvin and Hobbes strips and 1 Garfield) had English easy enough for them to understand, yet had pretty good punchlines (at least so I hoped). The kids had to walk around, telling each other the written text in each comic strip, but they couldn't show their strips to the others. There was a slight mix-up in the process, though - I thought there were 12 students in the class but there were 10, so the perfect math of having 3 teams of 4 students didn't work. And when I tried to explain the punchline behind each strip I didn't have extra copies of each strip and the overhead projectors in the classroom didn't work, so my explanations kinda fell flat. Sighs. I had really hoped that comic strips would be good for exercises in English.
Once the kids had their teams, I started the next game. I actually decided to scratch my first planned game and instead went for this word race competition, where in 1 minute a student from each time has to write on the board as many words as he/she can think of that start with the letter I give them. This went pretty well, except when one student wrote "sh*t" during one round (luckily NO ONE caught on - WHEW).
In the last 10 minutes I was going to have the kids to a Scattegories-type game individually but that didn't go quite as plan. To do this game you just need a scrap piece of paper with a few lines drawn on it - doesn't need to be anything fancy, but in Japan people don't really use "scraps" of paper and they don't just draw the lines. I was expecting the kids to get out their rulers to draw the lines on the paper (I had heard of this before), but I WASN'T expecting the kids to precisely measure the distance between each line, cut off excess paper (or get the teacher's permission to cut off the excess paper), or get out different colored pens. Oops. Lesson (for me) for next time: have pre-made paper with the lines already drawn on them.
I obviously need either more warning than just 3 periods, or an emergency lesson plan when this type of situation comes up. >_
I remember vaguely before coming here hearing about how the Japanese tend to treat special-needs people, and how it differs from America. I don't know where this impression came from, but for some reason I was anticipating not-so-friendly attitudes towards special-needs people. I don't know if this is typical of all public Japanese school systems, but I'm really pleasantly surprised and pleased at what I've seen so far in my schools. In 2 of my elementary schools there are 2 special-needs students - one physically handicapped in a wheelchair, the other physically and mentally handicapped with her own special instructor. Any of that supposed ostricizing I've heard about doesn't happen in my town, because the town's board of education is clearly able to meet the needs of these students. The first student - who I haven't been able to talk to directly yet, but I hear she's quite smart - basically is a member of her class like everyone else, while the other student is treated well by the other teachers in the school, although her needs demand more attention that can usually be given in a regular classroom. I can only judge by what I've seen, since no one can tell me the extent of these students' handicaps, but the treatment I've seen them get in their schools makes me almost envious, that Americans could provide for every special-needs student as well as my small town has been able to provide for the special-needs students here. But like I said, this is only the case in my own town - I've no way of knowing how Japanese schools nationwide treat other special-needs students.
Today in the junior high I was asked during first period to prepare fun activities for the advanced 3rd year students for fourth period. Other than my self-intro, I've never really done the planning for a full class at the junior high level, so I was in a bit of a panic. I ended up making a quick trip back home to pick up some materials to use.
Basically, my plan was this: have one activity to divide the students into teams, then have a series of competitions and at the end of the period the team with the most points wins. It kinda-sorta worked.
For the first thing - getting them into teams - I took a few newspaper comic strips I had cut out from my English newspaper and saved, copied them, and then gave them to the kids to find the rest of their teammates. The strips (2 Calvin and Hobbes strips and 1 Garfield) had English easy enough for them to understand, yet had pretty good punchlines (at least so I hoped). The kids had to walk around, telling each other the written text in each comic strip, but they couldn't show their strips to the others. There was a slight mix-up in the process, though - I thought there were 12 students in the class but there were 10, so the perfect math of having 3 teams of 4 students didn't work. And when I tried to explain the punchline behind each strip I didn't have extra copies of each strip and the overhead projectors in the classroom didn't work, so my explanations kinda fell flat. Sighs. I had really hoped that comic strips would be good for exercises in English.
Once the kids had their teams, I started the next game. I actually decided to scratch my first planned game and instead went for this word race competition, where in 1 minute a student from each time has to write on the board as many words as he/she can think of that start with the letter I give them. This went pretty well, except when one student wrote "sh*t" during one round (luckily NO ONE caught on - WHEW).
In the last 10 minutes I was going to have the kids to a Scattegories-type game individually but that didn't go quite as plan. To do this game you just need a scrap piece of paper with a few lines drawn on it - doesn't need to be anything fancy, but in Japan people don't really use "scraps" of paper and they don't just draw the lines. I was expecting the kids to get out their rulers to draw the lines on the paper (I had heard of this before), but I WASN'T expecting the kids to precisely measure the distance between each line, cut off excess paper (or get the teacher's permission to cut off the excess paper), or get out different colored pens. Oops. Lesson (for me) for next time: have pre-made paper with the lines already drawn on them.
I obviously need either more warning than just 3 periods, or an emergency lesson plan when this type of situation comes up. >_