Archive for December, 2014

The first winter snow 2014

Thursday, December 18th, 2014

It may not stay around long enough for us to have a white Christmas. Actually, I’m hoping it won’t 😉

But, we did get a good snow that came in fast last night and made a mess of things this morning here in Nagoya. This is the most snow we’ve seen in a while.

The weather forecast said it might snow last night, or early this morning, but there was no indication of how much snow were going to get. The weather has been at freezing for the last few days, and that makes it a lot easier to for the snow to stick. It was heavy, wet, and very sticky.

Trains were late, and traffic was brutal.

Here are a few shots from my balcony, and one from my home office window.

The one with the icicles is the apartment next door. We did get a few on our house, and there’s one picture of those, too.

The headless ghost – Drawing for explanation in the classroom

Thursday, December 4th, 2014

I find myself drawing in class a lot, and it does not always come out as I hope. I really should do some practicing and learn to draw some more specific things.

I am geting a little better at using drawings for illustrations in class, and a whiteboard is great for that. This is probably true in a lot of classroom settings, but I think it is even more so in a language classroom.

It is too easy to fall victim to using a dictionary, or translating, when you hit a snag trying to explain yourself.

I try to use English to explain English as much as possible in class, and drawings help me to do that. Drawings are great for helping students to have a better way to attach meaning to words rather than directly translating.

You don’t have to be great at drawing, but you need to draw with confidence.

Here is a quick illustration I did for headless, ghost, and poster:

headliess-ghost