We would like to thank all of the teachers for attending our IIEEC Osaka Study Group Meeting on March 2nd. Although it was a cloudy day, the room was brightened with the positive energy of the teachers who were there. It was a great time to learn together.
The workshop started by singing the song “Love Grows” with sign language. This lovely song is simple but carries a heartwarming message and we are sure every child will enjoy it.
As for Practice Key 1, we introduced how to teach the sentence pattern, “What’s that?” “It’s a pencil sharpener.” The students have already learned the question,” What’s this?” Many teachers commented that it is difficult not to give hints and wait for the students to answer by themselves. We believe it is very important for the teachers to give less oral hints and answers when they review what the students should already know. 
With the MAT METHOD, we use a lot of gestures and thus we can avoid having students wait for hints and repeating after the teacher. This is an important point so that our students won’t depend on teacher hints but will try to think on their own.
After the demonstration, the attendees were asked to be the teacher and checked how much they understood the steps of the MAT Practice System. How would you hold the cards and what would you look at when you DRILL? What do you think are the places that the students might find difficult? Which English sounds will be difficult for Japanese learners? It was fun to think and check how we should teach and why we need to do so. We also enjoyed how to lead the students to do the TELL section of the MAT METHOD.
In the second part of the meeting, we introduced how to review from Lesson 1 of the textbook using the IIEEC Question & Answer Cards. We have heard many teachers saying that they do not have time to review. Because of not having the time, even reviewing the previous lesson is sometimes skipped. We introduced some fun review activities that take only a short time. If you use the IIEEC Q & A student (small) cards, it is possible!! The following is one of the activities we introduced.
Find & Ask Game using the IIEEC Q & A student cards
1) Divide the students into several groups and have each group sit in a circle.
2) Put the Q cards facing down in a circle on the floor.
3) First the teacher just shows the action, for example; What do you want?
4) Looking at the gesture, the students say the question together.
5) When the teacher says ready go, everyone starts to find the card. They have to continue saying the question, as they turn the cards over one by one until someone finds the card.
6) The player who finds the card says, “I got it.” and gets a chip.
7) The Student asks the Question and the others answer.
8) Continue doing the same until time is up.
After reviewing several Q & A sequences, we enjoyed doing a Role Play. Paper bags were passed out and we pretended that we met a friend on our way home from shopping. We all had fun USING English and we know that this is one of the goals that we want our students to achieve. All the drills and practice steps are done for this reason. Please enjoy doing Role Plays with your students.
We also had a great time doing some seasonal activities. Please look at the pictures. It was really FUN!!!!!
Thank you again for coming to our meeting.
We are now planning for our next meeting on June 22nd.
We hope to see you soon there.
IIEEC Osaka