WS: 2nd Grade JHS Homestay Letter (New Crown ch8 DIW2)

If you use New Crown, you'll find this on page 77 of NC2.

Otherwise, this is a lesson which teaches the use of "I'm looking forward to..." and "I hope to (see)..."

This activity requires about 20-30 mins prep, several envelopes or containers, and some different colour sheets of paper. It should last about 25 mins from handing out the cards.

Here's what I do:

1. Students are given one hint card at random from each of the various sets (see links below). The sets I most commonly use are character, country, activity, food/drink, month/season, sport; but you can use more or less as you like.
2. Students must then write a letter to their future homestay family/character about what they want to get up to, using the hint cards.
3. The hints are deliberately unrelated. I think it's funny to have "I hope to play golf, eat spaghetti and see Tokyo Tower in Afghanistan" But explain that to your JTE. If they are as old and confused as mine, they may need telling twice. It needs to be relayed properly to the class, too.

If you don't use New Crown, the example e-mail reads like this:

From: Kentaro
Subject: Homestay in March

Dear Mr and Ms Smith,
My name is Fukuda Kentaro. You will be my host family this March. I am happy about this. What is the weather like in your town in March? What can I do to help you on your farm? I hope to see beautiful mountains in New Zealand. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Sincerely yours,
Kentaro

You can get them to simply reword that, or (of course) you can write a better example on the board, taking into account the cards you have chosen to use.

The hint card sets

Here are the sets I use (will open in Google Documents and may not look right. Save and open in MS Word and they should be fine):

• Characters
• Countries
• Dates
• Sports
• Food/drink
• Sights

And you may want to use:

• Family
• Blank sheet

It's best to print/copy these onto different coloured papers (much, much easier for re-sorting at the end of class). Give each student one card out of each set (give them out to each row of students, don't let them take their own out of the envelope. The JTE I was team teaching with did that and it took longer for her to give out one set that it did for me to give out five.)

As always, feel free to use this in any way you want, but please don't redistribute.