Time to start fresh in April!

Since it’s the start of the first semester, I generally try to put up posters introducing myself or alphabet/number review. My students absolutely love The Hungry Caterpillar so I thought I would make my review items Hungry-Caterpillar themed.

I think it turned out well!

The self introductions are from my co-worker (again, thank you sensei!), and the sign language poster is from another ALT friend of mine. I take no credit in making those!

This post was a bit late (yes, I know it's May now) due to being out of town. I still want to provide an example for April, but I will miss a layout for May.

Look forward to next month's (June) entry!

Materials:

• Microsoft Word

• B4 size poster paper

March English Board

March in Japan is the season of cherry blossoms and graduations. It is the end of the school year, and it can be extremely busy or painfully slow depending on your ALT responsibilities (and what the Japanese teacher asks of you). I decided to work on an ambitious large poster project, which turned out rather well: a poster about baby animals.

I ended up using word documents to gather my images and sentences explaining what you call a certain animal as a baby (ie. ‘A dog is called a puppy’). I would then print out with my Board of Education’s (BOE for short) color printer and cut them out individually, before using the double-sided tape to place the pictures on a nice pastel-colored background.

At first it was a single large poster, but I then decided to cut each picture out individually so I would have more flexibility with the size and position of the poster. After all, all five of my schools have different-sized English board areas.

At one of my schools, it ended up looking like this:

I once again had the help of my fellow ALTs and teachers to fill up the rest of the board with a lovely ‘Congratulations on Graduating’ poster, a beautiful set of picture cards depicting the seasons, and a cherry blossom tree filled with inspirational words from the students (that of course, look like cherry blossom flowers).

I really love the quote my co-worker used! Thank you, sensei!

I had fun thinking of how to display the graduation message!~

My materials:

• Large green poster paper (that does not curl in humid weather)

• Random poster paper (pastel colors for spring)

• Double-sided tape

Thanks for reading!

February means…Valentine’s Day!

Or: it's February now so I can spam the English Board with Valentine's cards.

Valentine’s Day has some stark differences in Japan than in the USA, so I thought I would focus on a holiday custom not really found in Japan: Valentine’s Day cards.

I gathered a big selection of the funny children’s valentines cards that you can find online and created a montage of them (with a small explanation of them on the side, in English and Japanese).

My February 2022 layout:

It’s a fairly time-consuming project with cutting all the cards out and laminating them, but I believe the students generally enjoy looking at them. I try to use cards with video game characters/cartoon characters that they know to attract their attention. A bonus was that the teachers enjoyed the English puns, which was a nice conversation starter (which is always a win).

Materials:

• Poster markers (zebra oil-based) for the message

• Pink/red colored-paper (A3 size)

• Google Docs (to place all the card pics in one doc and cut out)

• Laminator (borrowed from school)