Reporter: Theard

On 10 May 2018 JESIE hosted an open day at Wuxi Houzhai Middle School where students were entertained on the topic of Transportation. At the wheel to steer the lessons were teachers Tom and Steven.

Tom was first up and after starting his lessons with a great warm-up routine he introduced students to different places they can go to and then with what mode of transport they can get there. Tom had some amazing flash card games that the students really enjoyed. He then proceeded to build a sentence around what they have learned with students having to say "I go to school by bus". Tom scaffolded his lesson brilliantly and by the end of the lesson the students did a short conversation with a question, "How often do you go to school by car?" and students then responded by using the correct adverb to answer the question, "I often go to school by bus."

Next up was Steven. He started his lesson by greeting the students and then asking them various questions like "How are you?" or "How is the weather?" and the students really responded well to this. He then showed the students a short video about transportation and asked them if they can tell him what the lesson for the day was about. Steven then introduced them to various types of transportation vehicles which he then drilled down with a flash card game to see which student can identify it first. Next they learned the sentence structure "I travel by air on an aeroplane". Students had an opportunity to ask each other the question "How do you travel by sea/air/land?" and the other student then responded with the correct mode. Steven ended his lesson with a writing game which the students really enjoyed. He used a spinning wheel to choose a category (land/sea/air) and the students then had to run to the board and write the sentence "I travel by ___ on a/an____." 

At the end of the day the scores were tied and everyone walked away a winner. Great lessons by both teachers and an amazing day for all involved.

Reporter: William

Daniel began his lesson by telling the students to clear off their desks and settling the children. From this, be performed an icebreaker of asking the students how they were doing and asked them about the weather. Next, using PowerPoint slides, he introduced the 6 vocabulary words for the day: motorcycle, bus, boat, train, plane, and horse. Daniel drilled the vocabulary with the "slap listening game." Daniel would call two students to the board, say one of the vocabulary words, and cycle through the flashcards until the matched image was displayed. The first student to hit the card would be awarded points for his or her team. Moving onto a speaking exercise, Daniel played the "sticky ball" game. For this, Daniel placed all 6 image flashcards on the chalkboard in a grid. He then displayed a written method  of transportation on the PowerPoint. The first student to correctly throw the sticky ball at the corresponding image and say the word correctly was awarded points for his/her team. Daniel taught the lesson's sentence structure "I go to school by             ." by using the "sentence relay race" game.

Warwick began his lesson with a friendly icebreaker of asking the students to stand up, sit down, stand up, turn around etc. He then got the students speaking by asking them about the weather (Is is sunny, rainy, windy etc?) Using PowerPoint, Warwick introduced the 6 transportation-based vocabulary words for the day: bus, taxi, e-bike, car, walk, and bicycle. After a bit of playful drilling, and a round of the "reveal game," Warwick moved onto sentences. The sentence structure for the day was: "I go to school by             ." He drilled this structure by playing the lively "chopstick sentences" game. For this, teams of students had to run back and forth grabbing flashcards using only chopsticks in order toform "I go to school by              ." on the board. Warwick concluded the lesson by playing the "TPR telephone" game. For this, 5 students were selected for each gender and placed in a line. The student at the rear was told a method of transportation, he/she then conveyed the word to the student in front using only the TPR. 

Reporter: Tony

New Yorker Teacher Tim opened up the special open day class with some informal chat, which established his Socratic question and answer technique early in the session; throughout the session, students were pushed to produce more detailed answers. The main subject was transportation, although other subjects were also touched upon. Tim quizzed the students on many aspects of transportation, including the parts of a car, brands of cars, and about transportation in general (cars, bikes, metros and airplanes). The new vocabulary was reinforced by a sequence of games; a match-up/reveal game, 'Pictionary' drawing game, anagrams game and finally closing with a 'Minesweeper' bomb game. All in all, a packed and enjoyable 45minutes!

Teacher Kris began by introducing the main classifications of animals (bird, insect, reptile) before reinforcing the new vocabulary with a sequence of 'reveal' games. This was followed by a short quiz to highlight the features of these animal types using some targeted phrases e.g. 'Reptiles have cold blood'. Moving on to the main theme... dinosaurs! Teacher Kris showed that dinosaurs were in fact reptiles, and explained how they met their dramatic end. He also showed how their remains may still be found today, all over the world. Dinosaur words tend to be quite a mouthful, but Teacher Kris used this to his advantage by focussing on syllables and phonics, also explaining the etymology of the words, which can help some learners (especially those with analytical tendencies) with their recall. An enjoyable and interesting session was rounded out by recapping the new words and phrases with an exciting 'Minesweeper' game.

Reporter: Sam

JESIE teachers Tim Sowards and Paul Counter made their way to Wuxi Xin'an Primary School on Thursday to teach the Grade Four and Fives about different modes of transportation.

Tim kicked off his Grade Four lesson by introducing the new vocabulary: walk, bus, taxi and metro. This was followed with an energetic flashcard touch game, where students raced to "swat" the correct pictures at Tim's prompt. Tim next used mimes to present his target sentences: I walk , I take the bus, I take a taxi and I take the metro. Students then used flashcards to unscramble these sentences as quickly as possible. Lastly a minesweeper game was used to apply the sentences to the question "How do you get to school?". After answering the question correctly based on their flashcards, students were allowed to choose a square on the minesweeper grid – rewarded with either points valued 1-5 or a bomb! 

Paul taught the Grade Fives of Xin'an, beginning his class with a role play. Students were given toy cellphones to perform a greeting dialogue. After discovering that it was a student's birthday, Paul then taught the class to sing 'Happy Birthday' in English. Next came vocabulary – Paul introduced the words motorbike, train, car and aeroplane along with actions for each. A game of Hot Seat followed, with a student at the front guessing the flashcard behind him from the miming of the class. Vocabulary was further reinforced with a Ball Toss game, where a student from each team threw balls at the flashcards on the board after listening to the teacher. The students learnt the question and answer combination, "How do you come to school?" "I come to school by _____". Paul also used the minesweeper game to practise the sentences, awarding or taking away points according to the square chosen by the students.

Both classes had loads of fun, and will doubtless be teaching their friends and family in turn about the different modes of transportation.

Reporter: Megan

On a cloudy but still very warm day in Wuxi, Theard and Steven taught Xincheng Middle School all about transportation. Lots of fun was had today, which included all sorts of games including dice, spinners and some good old-fashioned running.

To kick things off,in Theard's class he introduced himself and what he liked, pizza, then passed a cuddly husky toy around to get to know the students before teaching them 3 types of transportation, air, land and sea. He then proceeded to teach different modes of transportation for each such as car, bicycle, motorcycle, yacht, boat, helicopter, aeroplane and even space shuttle!

Meanwhile in Steven's class he was teaching the students both the UK and USA versions of certain modes of transport such as aeroplane and plane, both ways being equally as acceptable. For one of the games the students had to mime these different ways of transportation. They formed a line and the first person was shown what to mime and the student at the end of the line had to guess. This was a very fun game that the students seemed to really enjoy. After teaching the sentences, 'How do you travel by ______ ? I travel by _______ in/on an/a _______', they then played another game. This time a spinner decided if it was by land, air, or sea, they then had to run and write and finish off the sentence on the board with the fastest getting points.

In Theard's class they played a dice game whereby the number rolled of dice one chose where they were going to and dice 2 chose a mode of transportation to form the sentence, 'I go to _______ by _______.' Now if this sentence made sense they had 10 points but if it was a false sentence they only got 5 points. The students found this game very funny especially when sentences such as  'I go to the moon by train' were being produced.

The students from both classes had a fun lesson and learned a lot about transportation in the process. Team 1 were the winners today for class 6 and the girls won for class 1, which then ended in good sportsmanship of a round of applause for both of the winning teams.