Teaching demonstration

In my classrooms

Here in Japan, I teach about 200 students throughout the entire town, from elementary first grade (age 6 or 7) to final years of senior high school (age 17 or 18) in four different schools. On a typical week, I'll teach about 15 or more classes. Therefore, I meet, adapt and learn about all of my students throughout a typical school year. This makes my classes extremely varied and interesting, with only some overlaps. This comes from the fact I teach at two elementary schools twice a week, so I teach the same information twice!

In my teaching demonstration video, I introduce using a dictionary to my newest incoming class of first year junior high students (~ 7th grade). As sixth graders in elementary school, these students have only used picture dictionaries. As junior high students, their linguistic knowledge deepens into more reading and writing, and the use of dictionaries becomes important. In this video, I walk students through how to find different words quickly through their paper Japanese-English dictionaries, as well as online using the website Jisho.org as an alternative to Google Translate.

In this video, I teach my students how to use both paper dictionaries, and online dictionaries. Besides the work in their textbook, they also had to complete SeeSaw activities. To see screenshots from SeeSaw and the lesson plan for the day, please click here.