Filling in the Holes: a New Horizon, Unit-Based Worksheet

Eric Robinson

PROCEDURE:

1. Wait for JTE to finish the lesson.

2. Hand out the worksheet to students as they finish taking notes or some other assigned work.

3. Explain the worksheet to the students, using Japanese (through JTE if necessary) where necessary.

4. Monitor students’ progress. If they are not working or moving forward, give a hint or a boost with an answer.

5. Reward with stickers!

NOTES:

I have personally never been given the opportunity to make an entire lesson plan for my stu-dents. Instead I am occasionally asked by my JTEs to create short activities or worksheets that the faster students can work on when they finish their notes or other work. I find that giving too much work for even the faster students is a good way to do this. However, this re-quires that the work be less work and more fun.

The idea behind this worksheet style is that you give a lot of entertaining work that has the students approach the material from a different angle. The benefit of the applied word-search is that the students have two possible methods of discovering answers: through the word-search or through understanding the provided sentences. In the prior case, students will gain insight into how English spelling works and then find the appropriate sentence for the word. In the latter case, students will have to understand the grammar of the sentence be-fore finding the word and then they can use the spelling of that word to locate it in the cross-word. In both cases you are encouraging the students to think proactively instead of through rote memorization through an entertaining framework.

Note that this worksheet allows students to work at their own speed. A requirement from the JTE was that the activity be silent (to allow slower students to finish their work) but engaging and open to pair work (such that the faster students could help the slower students... or in my experience, so that the faster students could leave their paper out for the slower students to copy). By offering two paths to the final goal students have more opportunity for success rather than relying on one potentially rough road: if students crash on one path then perhaps they’ll fly on the other.

• The vocabulary used for the worksheet was taken from New Horizon Unit 5 and was used to supplement that day’s work. Feel free to edit the sentences portion to more closely or loosely tie into the grammar from that unit or other recent ones.

• How to vary and adapt the activity, follow on activities, things to watch out for, etc:

a) Do not allow students to look on at other people’s work. That defeats the purpose.

b) If your school allows it, feel free to change the reward. My school limits me to stickers.

c) Throw bonus words into the crossword. This forces students to be more objective with filling in sentences and gives them more words to locate.

d) The idea is that there’s too much work to finish in class. Allow the students to bring it in with them the next day (or... ever) for the reward or an added reward (more stickers!).

e) Think of adding a third way of finding words and applying them to sentences. Instead of a paper “Word Search”, try an actual “Word Search” (like a scavenger hunt) by putting the words in different places around the classroom or school and give the students hints as to their location.

f) If your English classes are based on ability then change the difficulty as necessary by add-ing conjugation to the words from the crossword, etc.

HANDOUTS and WORKSHEETS:

The handout for this lesson can be found here: http://storage01.pbwiki.com/f/New_Horizon_unit_worksheet.pdf