Crossing the River

This is a simple game for teaching probability. I remember one of my own teachers using it, and I’ve recreated the game board for my own use. The rules are quite simple:

• Each student receives 12 tokens, 2 dice and a worksheet.
• The student places the 12 tokens on any of the 12 spaces on the Start side of the river.
• The student rolls the dice. They may move one token across the river in the space that matches the dice roll.
• The object of the game is to move all of the tokens across the river in the least number of rolls.

The students quickly discover that some numbers come up more often than others, and that a pair of dice will never roll 1. For a more advanced lesson, different means of generating numbers could be used: a 12-sided dice, three 4-sided dice, twelve coins, a spinner and so on.

Flash Cards

I designed this series of flash cards while working as an ESL tutor. My student was a visual learner, so these cards helped her with both vocabulary and sentence building. Each card includes the following elements:
– A  title bar whose color indicates whether the word is a noun, verb or adjective.
– An icon on the upper left indicates the vocabulary topic (such as weather or games).
– An image illustrating the word.
– A simple definition or description of the word.
– An example sentence with the vocabulary word highlighted.

So far, this card series includes 56 cards, covering the topics of weather, animals, foods, activities, simple adjectives, and locations. Most of the images are from Google Image Search. The card template is quite versatile, and I could easily expand the series to include more items and topics.

Asking for Directions in Japanese

This PDF is the fourth in a set of 20 lessons in basic Japanese which I put together while tutoring an adult student. I wouldn’t call myself fluent in Japanese, but I understand enough about the language to pass on the basics to someone else. I decided to create my own materials for these lessons because, of the various textbooks available to me, none were what I wanted. Most were either travel phrasebooks or focused on grammar, and I wanted a more comprehensive approach.

Each of the lessons I put together contains the following elements:
– One or two pages giving related vocabulary
– A series of example phrases or dialogue about the topic
– Explanations of one or two grammar concepts, usually related to the topic
– A brief note on a point of usage or polite language
– Descriptions of one or two grammatical particles and their use

This is definitely not a self-study text; there are no practice exercises, and the vocabulary and phrases are presented in kana only, without a romanized version. This is because one of my goals was to teach my student how to read kana in conjunction with learning the rest of the language.

If I ever go back and revise these lessons, one thing I would change is to include a vocabulary list including romanizations and translations for all of the vocabulary in each lesson. I would also like to find a more flexible kana font (the one I used here was difficult to work with), and, of course, have everything checked by a native speaker of Japanese.