My school offers clubs to 4th-6th graders. The clubs are just magically decided by someone and then they force teachers to be in charge of them for the year. Obviously, me being the ALT means I’m in charge of English club.
I’m curious to know if anyone has had experience doing English club a this level and what kind of activities were successful for you.
Anything would be helpful.
10 comments
-are you the first one to be in charge of the club? If not, what did the previous person do?
-Elementary school right? Levels are very very different from 4th to 5th. 5th and 6th can do the same things, but 4th graders are still in 3rd grade in their minds. So try to make activities for 2 levels, not for everyone in general.
-How ofthen would you be doing this, for how long, and is it for 50 mins?
-Are there any school materials available?
-What are the limits? (I mean can you take them to the gym and stuff? Can you watch videos?)
-I would prepare one or two games, let them play that the whole class, and repeat that for 3 or even 4 lessons in total. Better plan something complicated once a month that a different lesson every week?
You can find some fun English games. I would also recommend watching movies or tv shows occasionally (don’t turn it in to movie club). I’m high school, but we watched Kiki’s Delivery Service with English dub. It worked well because most students already knew the movie so they could totally focus on the English. I advise avoiding Japanese subtitles because they’ll focus more on reading the Japanese than listening to the English.
If the school allows it, I’d probably just make it fully fun. Don’t make it into homework. Instead, watch a TV show or film in English, getting them to discuss it after. Gotta get them juiced on the idea of English opening up avenues of media for them to enjoy, instead of it being purely academic or a future job thing.
Watch fun movies with English audio and Japanese subtitles (Disney for example).
Play games. I played uno with my Jr high kids and made them say the color and number (or type) of the card. You can find many other fun games that use simple English vocabulary. Like memory. Have half the cards be English grammar (say animals) and the other half be pictures. You have to match the picture to the word.
Do skits. Have the kids write and act basic scenarios in English.
Karaoke! You can find videos on Youtube with the lyrics on them and no lead vocal. Set up a projector and let the kids pick a song. You can get some cheap USB hand held microphones too.
Art projects. I had my kids make Christmas cards in December. Bought a bunch of origami paper for them to cut and glue, you could also use pens and markers or stickers. Then gave them various set phrases (like Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc.) and had them write those.
Figuring out what the kids like doing and going from there even if its pretty basic is your best bet. If they like singing, do the karaoke thing more often. Movies? Watch more of those. Games? Card games are quick and easy.
Also, see if you can come up with ways for them to earn points and get rewards the more points they earn. Gamifying learning is a good way to go, especially with younger kids.
This is what I did in my English club, and it worked very well, and we had a lot of fun.
I can’t say every school will be okay with it, as it’s pretty much illegal (copyright) but my school was fine with it.
I spent a few years working for the Eikaiwa NOVA. Each level (5-9) had four textbooks (one for each season). The way we taught lessons was very simple:
1. Pick a lesson from the relevant book.
2. Smalltalk with students for 5-10 minutes.
3. Ask the students the question at the top of the page.
4. Dialogue (teacher reads, listen and repeat, students read in pairs)
5. Language section (mostly listen/repeat, pairwork).
6. Listening section (read from the back of the book, students pick the correct answer).
7. Practice section (students use the target language to ask the teacher/other students questions.)
8. Production section (students practice having conversations with the target grammar).
Some of the students in the English club were going to Eikaiwa, other students wanted to go to Eikaiwa, but joined English club instead.
So I basically turned the English club into a free Eikaiwa.
I bought copies of the four beginner (level 5) Nova textbooks on Mercari for 500y each, and taught them exactly as I would have taught them when I worked at Nova.
Obviously, if Nova ever found out I (and the school, BoE etc.) would be in deep shit. But the school approved, so it was all good.
Did English club twice a week. Tuesday was “Eikaiwa Day”, Thursday was “Movie Day”.
Obviously buying copywritten materials and doing this as I did might be a problem for you, but maybe you can find some age/level-appropriate conversational textbook approved for educational use at Junkudo or something and do a mini-Eikaiwa without running afoul of the law.
Here’s some of the stuff we do:
* English Club newspaper. Students write articles in English about things that have been going on at school. I put the articles together and slap some pictures on there and print some copies for club members and one copy per classroom that teachers will stick on the back chalkboard.
* Movie night. When in doubt… but I also have students write their thoughts on the movie in English afterward.
* Holiday parties. Halloween party, carve jack-o-lanterns (when pumpkins are available) Christmas party, etc.
* Cooking. We do this several times a year. Follow recipes in English and cook some fun stuff
* English Guide. We take a day trip to a local famous spot and have students guide us around in English. Before the trip, each club member learns all about the place in question.
* Jinro/Werewolf/Mafia in English. I’m also really into board games so I sometimes bring my own from home.
* Our English Club members also emcee the school English speech contest. They introduce each speaker and also do a fun school-wide quiz game while the teachers are tallying up the speech contest scores.
Uf, this one’s gonna be a little rough. It’s pretty uncommon to have ES English club, so most resources are geared towards HS clubs (as evidenced by some of these comments). 4th-6th is also a pretty big spread ability wise.
I would recommend making the English club really game centric. I do a seasonal ES Eikaiwa and that’s how I run it. It helps the kids have a more positive attitude towards English class. That said though, personally I find it kind of difficult to make games for ES since they can’t read (for HS people, I mean literally, can’t even read an isolated word off a card). A lot of fun games involve reading instructions or reading a prompt off a card/worksheet and well, they can’t.
Some popular activities for my 3rd/4th grade Eikaiwa were mainly vocab games (since they don’t really learn to form sentences until 5th). We did
Don Janken: put pictures cards in a line on the floor. Split the kids into two teams and put them at opposite sides of line of cards. A representative from each side moves down the line, saying the vocab word for each card as they go. When they two kids meet in the middle, they play Janken. The loser goes back to their team while the winner continues on. The losing team sends out a new rep, from the beginning of the line. The first team to have a rep reach the other side wins.
Shooting Game: Vocab time trials. One kid stands at the front. The other kids are randomly given vocab cards. On the count of 3, all the kids hold up their cards. The kid at the front has to name all the cards as fast as possible. Record everyone’s time
Pictionary
For your own sanity I would recommend establishing a format and having every club session follow that format, just change the contents. That’ll cut down on a lot of planning work for you. Kids also tend to like consistency
I ran one from 1st to 6th grade. There were so many students the kocho split the younger 1-3rd into 3, 15 minute segments. What I did for them was play tpr games like “let’s touch OO” or show animal flash cards and gesture them with everyone. Very active. In a later school, origami in english with the younger ones is fun. Paper airplanes to hit vocab targets is popular but can get crazy.
4th to 6th I would use to try out games that wouldn’t be able to in class or that the students liked from class. We did sugoroku, typhoon, some fast card games. Mostly teams because of the amount of students. Always games to make them more interested in english. The kocho wanted them to be more excited to learn English. With the mixed class I would push the 6th graders to help teach the 4th. Not that anything was above what the current 6th had learned. But this was during the “we can” textbooks.
Long story short games. Try and bring the energy.
The first thing you need to do is commit to a direction: is the club gonna be a fun hang out or extra learning? You need to stick to one otherwise it gets fuzzy and hard to plan for. If you don’t want it to be extended learning then I would drop trying to teach completely.
If you have netflix, disney+, amazon prime you can watch shows together with subtitles on.
If you have a club the club should have a budget. Find that out and purchase some board games, card games and other moving around games like Twister etc. Build up that stock of things to pull out. Even some toy instruments or things you guys could build together.
I play some simple board games with my club and teach them the specific vocab for that game, then make them use it more often than you normally would. For example, with uno I request that the student says the name of the card they play.
Popular games include; Uno, Cockroach poker, Obake Catch and Rainbow Jenga (the blocks are coloured and you roll a dice to determine what colour block you must remove.