Monthly Update December 2023
Welcome to our school monthly update for December 2023. Our school offers lessons for elementary school-aged children and above. In addition, we provide daily conversation and business English classes for adults. We offer onsite lessons at our school location in Yoga, Tokyo. Additionally, we provide Zoom lessons for remote students.
Please contact us at staff@bumblebenglish.com if you are interested in a trial lesson or have any questions about our school.
Group Lessons - Kids
Our new bi-weekly Sunday lessons for pre-elementary school students are going well. We have a friendly group of students who are engaged and excited to participate. Due to the classroom size, we limit the number of students per lesson to four, allowing everyone to stretch and move around a bit. The focus is phonics, letter recognition, songs, and simple vocabulary.
Our beginner-level classes on Mondays and Fridays are nearly finished with the beginning phonics workbook. This workbook has focused on all the alphabet sounds and has helped increase students’ vocabulary. Students are progressing well with the small book series we introduced last month. Each book is eight pages long and contains 1-2 short sentences per page. Students read the books in class and take the books home to practice writing the sentences.
The Oxford University Press Dolphin Readers Level book series is handy for Level 2 and above students. The topics are fun; each book contains questions reinforcing reading comprehension and vocabulary development. For most of our Level 2 students, we have completed the textbook and have taken the final proficiency exam. Happily, most of the students remembered the material and did very well on the exam.
For our Level 3 classes, students have been practicing their writing skills by answering writing questions from past Eiken Pre-2 exams.
Private Lessons - Kids
For many of our private lesson classes, the focus has been on reading comprehension and question-and-answer responses. We use materials related to the Eiken test and reading comprehension workbooks from Scholastic, an educational publisher in the United States. One elementary school student is studying for the Pre-2 Eiken test. As a result, each week, we practice writing based on the Eiken writing question format. Previously, to encourage writing, we asked students to make a journal and write in it a few times a week. Regularly scheduled journal writing is good practice and something we may revisit.
Private & Group Lessons - Adults
Our Wednesday morning adult group class is going well. The lessons have incorporated a lot of role-playing and real-life situations. The class is fun, as adult students can now talk to each other and add funny comments and ideas.
For one private adult student, we focused on his self-introduction. This student will be making a trip to Africa during the New Year period, so the focus has been on using various types of greetings, conversational phrases, and self-introduction. This student is very studious and prepares a written diary of activities he has done each week. While the student reads from his diary, we also ask questions to reveal more details and encourage conversation.
Summary
As the year comes to a close, we are happy to see the progress of our students. 2023 has been a return to normal after the multi-year impact of the coronavirus, and we are thankful for having the opportunity to be a part of each of our student’s lives, even if it is just for a short time.
We look forward to the new year, the excitement of new students joining our school, and the bittersweet happiness of seeing students leave BumbleB English to develop their studies further or move and study abroad.
We encourage anyone interested in our school to contact us for a free trial lesson. Online lessons are available as well for students regardless of location.
As always, please get in touch with us directly for information about our school: staff@bumblebenglish.com
