This lesson is really very straight-forward, and every ５年生 student should already know this stuff. I decided to teach Days of the Week at the same time, so the students have the entire year to practice those. The book has pretty fun activity with "Hello" in different languages, too.
Since I'm teaching Days of the Week in this lesson, my theme song is "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday", which can be found on almost any English CD. I also throw in "Hello, How are you?" for one lesson since it's featured in the book, and it's on the Hi Friends CD, too. I didn't make that the theme song because it's really easy, and most of the students already knew that song from １年生 or some other younger class.
The book provides some beautiful flashcards on page 8. If you use the PDF version of the book, you can create them perfectly. There's only 6, though, which makes the vocabulary really short. Later, I add a few more responses to "How are you?" but I don't have any flashcards.
For the Days of the Week, I just used kanji: 日, 月, 火, 水, 木, 金, and 土. I typed them out in Word using a fancy kanji font, and used those as flashcards. I couldn't think of anything better. I didn't want to use the words, and I didn't have any good images either. Kanji is fine, and we sing the song enough that after two classes, you don't need them anymore.
The first class is basically just a vocabulary lesson. First, I teach the Days of the Week, then we sing the song to reenforce the vocabulary. Also, I make sure that we practice saying the Days of the Week backwards, and in different orders, so they can recall any day without being subject to the order. Some students still use the song to figure it out, though.
From now on, at the start of class, I will ask, "What Day of the Week is it?" Followed by, "What day was it yesterday?" "How about tomorrow?" And then ask specific examples.
After that, we sing the "How are you?" song, then practice the different responses to "How are you?"
For the activity, we simply play the Keyword Game, nothing fancy.
One of my classes was super cooperative and smart that we had too much time for the game at the end. After several rounds of mixing up the vocabulary, I asked the class if there were any volunteers who wanted to do the game of the class. Immediately five hands went up, so I had them Janken to decide. It went really well. :)
This whole class is basically review of the vocabulary introduced in the previous class.
We practice the Days of the Week quite a bit. I ask them for the Days of the Week, and point to specific flashcards. We read them backwards and forwards, and sing the song. Then we do the Timer Game, where the entire class tries to say the Days as fast as they can, and then beat their time.
For the feelings, we do the short activity in the book. I have the students ask me, "How are you, ___?" with one of the character's names. Then I respond, and the students connect the dots in the book. After we do the reverse, where I ask the class, "How are you, ___?" and they respond with their answer.
The activity for the day worked out really well. I call it the Janken Conquering Game, though it's probably called something better by someone else who thought of this idea, too.
You create groups within the class, and give them a specific response to "How are you?" For example, Group A has Happy, Group B has Sad, etc, etc. The students walk around the room and interview each other. They ask, "How are you?" "I'm ____. And you?" "I'm ___." If the responses are different, then they'll Janken each other. The loser now says the winner's response.
We play this for 5 minutes, and then see which response has "conquered" the other responses. Each time, there's one group that's been completely wiped out. :)
For the last class of this lesson, I wanted to throw in gestures, and commands since they mention it a little bit in the book. I extend the "How are you?" vocabulary a little bit to include I'm hot, I'm cold, I'm sick, and a few others.
At the start of class, the Timer Game gets a little bit old, so we do the Race Game instead. This is basically the same as the Timer Game, but in groups, and they complete against each other, rather than the clock. I have the students go through all the Days twice, and then sit down.
Each time I did this, there was a group that was clearly faster than the others and won every time. After 2 rounds of this, I had the faster groups go through the Days more times. For example, the fastest group had to say the Days 4 times. The second fastest had to do it 3 times. Etc, etc. This really evened this out, and made it more competitive.
After that, we do the gesture activity in the book, and I teach them some more gestures, as well as classroom commands, such as Stand Up, and Sit down.
Each time I did this, though, we ran out of time and didn't get to do Simons Says. That's fine with me, since I hate Simon Says, but it kind of leaves the class on an unfinished note that doesn't get picked up next lesson.
Overall, this lesson is pretty easy for the students. Almost all the students already know "How are you?" and the responses. And several students already know the Days of the Week, too. I could probably skip the 3rd class and go straight to the next lesson. Or maybe I just need to think of something better to complete this lesson as a whole.
I dunno. The Janken Conquering Game is really fun, though, and I'm definitely using that with the younger grades from now on.