excerpted from the report (translated from Japanese): Primary and secondary school curriculum and projects for team-teaching with an AET:  connecting international understanding, multi-media, environmental studies, and English-as-a-second language

  Everyone's Birthday Party gives a simple, adventurous view of the history of space and life on earth as a series of inter-connected birthdays. The story is told through the imaginary diary of a six year old boy who just had a birthday party. The boy notices that there are the same number of people at his party as his age, he gives a year to each person to divide his age. This method of dividing time into the number of people in the room is used again when the brightest star takes the kids on a birthday adventure to the "Big Birthdays Room." The star divides his age between thirty people -- the six kids and twenty-four space spirits in the room -- to show how everyone's birthday is connected. The star then zooms-in on the last person representing the last 500 million years.  Students learn to divide this time-span on our upper body and review the story of land-life on earth.  Humans come into the birthday story in the last centimeter on the students wrists.  We zoom-in even further on this story to see the story of human migrations to all parts of world during the last five hundred thousand years. The story pays special attention to changes in skin color and eye shape depending on the new environments people encountered.@ The story is divided into three parts and can be taught in three or four hours including word recognition games.

Purpose and class outline for four class hours

Objectives:

  1. Know that your birthday, birthdays in space, and the birthdays of all of life on earth are connected.
  2. Know about the birth of humans and how they migrated around the world.
  3. Depending on the environment people migrated to, skin color, eye color and eye shape changed.

picture #1Lesson One (pictures 1 through 3 of the storyboard) A Birthday Party:   know that everyone has a birthday, even a star.

the math problem winnerpicture #4Lesson Two (Pictures 4 and 5) Big Birthday Room: we take a "birthday adventure" to see the connections between birthdays in space and life on earth.

picture #6Lesson 3 (pictures 6 through 11) "Human Birthday Adventure" (The adventure of human birthdays: he story of how the family of humans were born and came to migrate around the world.

Lesson 4 (Review of the story)  Students give their opinions about the story, and we play KARUTA and/or Bingo to review the English words and phrases.

Student Survey Results
(9 months after the lesson)

Lower Primary Grades

Nakamichi-Kita Primary School, third grade (actual class second grade)

1) What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?

Nakamichi-Minami Primary School, fourth grade (actual class third grade), 29 students

1) What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?

Nakamichi-Kita Primary School, fourth grade (actual class third grade), 27 students

1) What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?

Toyotomi Primary School, fourth grade (actual class third grade), 35 students

1) What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?

Upper Primary Grades

Toyotomi Primary School, fifth grade--homeroom #2, (actual class fourth grade), 18 students

1)What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?

Nakamichi-Kita primary school sixth grade--homeroom #1, sixth grade (actual class fifth grade), 20 students

1) What did you think of the lesson?

2) What was the best part?


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