We had another wonderful Study Group Meeting in Osaka on December 4th.
We started the Meeting by singing a Christmas Song, “Here comes Santa Claus.” The song is relatively difficult but, with the help of picture cards and cute gestures, we showed how your students would love to sing this song in class.
With Practice Key 1, we introduced how to teach occupation vocabulary and how to have the students say sentences such as “He is a taxi driver. She is a teacher.” Then we taught the Question form through the MAT Practice System which is well designed so that the students will enjoy the DRILL. Sometimes drilling is thought to be boring and non-creative, however, the WAY we do it is important. We also use gestures even for the indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ so that young learners will not be confused with the grammatical terms. 
At the ‘It’s your turn’ corner, the participants took turns to be a teacher and practice the steps of Practice Key 1. Holding the cards right next to your face and shuffling the cards from the back to front really works well in order to keep the rhythm. One of the teachers mentioned that she wished she had known how to do this earlier. But it is never too late!!
In Practice Key 2, we showed how we can teach the objective cases him/ her/ them. We believe that using the mother tongue really helps students understand the concept of the target sentence and it will avoid students’ misunderstanding. We enjoyed a Role Play and the Activities as well as a chant. We are pleased to know from what was written on the questionnaires that literally all of the participants found this useful and enjoyed learning how to teach these difficult sentences easily.
Finally we had a good time doing the Christmas Activities. Dressing and undressing Santa Claus was really fun. We enjoyed telling the story of Santa Claus going shopping to the North Pole, which is an original story written by Ritsuko Nakata!
We are thankful for those who came and warmly supported us this year.
We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
Noriko Matsumoto
IIEEC Osaka
