Yesterday - imaginative title, I know!

After getting all the chores out of the way we did marshmallow sculptures, I have been wanting to do this for a while but we always eat the marshmallows before we have chance to try it! He made the cube by himself, I just had to assist with some stick holding under his instruction, although I said it was a cube he insisted it was a car!

Next we did some counting practice, Laura posted about this site the other day, it has got lots of great activities and although I prefer to make things myself, sometimes time doesn't allow for this - a hard lesson for me to get into my skull. This one has dino eggs to count, then you fasten a peg to the correct number. I had stuck small stickers on the back of the correct number so that he could self check. I am having problems with the self checking thing because he checks BEFORE he has finished, which kind of defeats the object. Any advice on how to stop him? I have tried explaining and I don't think he is cheating, in his words 'I am just looking, not checking' hmmm.
In the afternoon R-Kun came for his lesson. I had no idea what he did and didn't know, so I planned a series of games to test different skills, to start I asked both boys to put on their aprons and explained that it was work time not play time and that they could only use English. This worked well. Here the boys are matching the objects with the 3 letter word cards, they did a great job working together. It turned out the R-kuns reading is better than Ebi-kuns but the opposite applies for writing so they were helping each other.
After playing a number of games we went downstairs for a snack, we did some TPR (Total Physical Response) this is a popular method when teaching ESL. The teacher calls out a command and the student has to follow that command physically, the idea is that the child will remember the new vocab better when it is combined with a physical action. You start off simple, with things like 'stand up', 'sit down' then extend it to things like 'touch the door', ' open the window' R-kun was good at this too so we ended up with long instructions like ' take a bath then gets dry and put on your PJs' The boys loved doing this and there was much giggling.

We played the mystery bag game where I noticed that R-kun struggled with every-day vocab so we can work on that too. We finished off with some yoga, this was also a big hit as you can see by the lions below!
I am pretty sure R-kun will be fine once he starts at the international school, for now we just need to build up his confidence, I think the next few weeks will be fun.

On a different note, the swap is now closed, I will be sorting out the groups over the next couple of days.