After a less than organized Lesson 4, I decided to plan the entire structure of the Lesson upfront so I had a clear roadmap from start to finish what I hoped to achieve and how many classes it would take. The main focus of this lesson is learning all the country names and the grammar. And then make a poster of your favorite country. :)
Having the students makes posters was a fantastic idea. I wanted the students to have something physical they could show their family at home to emphasize the lesson. I remember when I was kid, all the stupid homework my parents posted on our fridge, so I wanted to give the students the same opportunity. Also, this gave me (and the students) a chance to flex our artist skills by drawing a poster from scratch. Some students made beautiful drawings. :)
Introduce all the words for the countries. I expanded the vocab from the book because I thought they were missing a few countries. Plus, most of the countries are the same in Katakana, so adding more didn't really change the difficulty of the lesson.
Introduce the new song. "It's a Small World" seemed like a good choice. For the lesson, I wanted the students to think about where all these countries were in the world. And I also wanted to see how terribly wrong they could be.
Start introducing the grammar. I started with the Questions first. I'm also introduce all the famous foods and places here too. I'm not expecting the students to remember all those names, though. It's more of an example of what is out there in the world.
Introduce the rest of the grammar. This grammar expands on the simple one word answers from the previous lesson. Also, do all of the listening activities in the book.
Show the students a finished poster, then tell them they'll be making one themselves, and that next week, they'll all be giving a presentation showing it off.
The students get up in the front of class and show off their finished poster. The class, as a whole, asks them questions, and the student answers.
"It's a Small World" was totally fine. But, like usual, it took forever to search and find a song that had a good rhythm, and sang the lyrics straight without any musical interpretation, or stupid voice overs, or anything extra. I just wanted the normal song.
There was a compilation of kids songs on iTunes named "Kids Pop: Favorite Fun Songs" that had a perfectly fine version. No extras, Sang straight, and had all the lyrics. And it sounded good enough that I didn't get bored or annoyed by it after signing it class after class.
I did not use the book to create my flash cards for this lesson. For the flags, Wikipedia had vector images with perfect proportions, so I create images from those, and printed them out. For all the food and places, I simply used google image search.
Overall, this lesson went amazingly better than the previous one. All the students made their own posters. And some students made some beautiful drawings. I wish I would've thought about taking photos of their finished works at the time.
For one of my schools, the presentations just happened to be on the same day as the PTA open house. So, those lessons turned into demonstration lessons. And it could not have gone better. All the students performed perfectly. The class had excellent rhythm asking the questions, and very few kids bottled up, or had trouble saying what they drew. It was great. :)