Sports

Sports is a relatively easy topic to teach. The Japanese and English words for many sports is similar. But it is also an opportunity to start working on pronunciation or sentences like "I like soccer.", "I play football.", "I want to play volleyball.", or "Do you want to play baseball?".

This is also an opportunity to introduce your own culture by talking about sports from your home country and showing pictures of local heroes.

Activities

• Video game. Use a video of sports to test the students knowledge.

Ideas

• Go through old newspapers and pull out all the sports related pages with pictures and use in addition to the flash cards. Most schools have bundles of old newspapers you can pilfer before recycling.
• Charades is pretty easy with sports but the kids often enjoy it anyways.
• Sports come in three varieties: there are sports we do (kendo, karate), sports we play (basketball, baseball), and sports that are verbs (I run. I ski.). Make a list of the sports you want to cover and introduce the kids first to "do" sports, then to "play" sports and finally to "verb" sports. This progression is great because "do" sports are generally Japanese sports, so the translation is literal. Then explain that most ball sports are "play" sports. As a third step up, if it's the right level for your class, teach "verb" sports and how to conjugate English verbs from 1st person to 3rd person.

See also

• General-use games.
• Teaching resources