I am happy to report that 80% of the students at my Smith’s School of English Franchise in Kotoen are actively participating in the new 1-point homework, and one particular student has far exceeded my expectation of what is required.
Not only does she have excellent hand-writing and note-taking skills, she also keeps a sepearate, A6-sized notebook strictly devoted to the 1-Point Homework! Each weekly homework has its own separate page and there is no chance of getting mixed up since she updates it every Monday morning.
This MM student usually comes early Tuesday mornings and is very often the first student I see for the week. The beauty of this is that she knows what the weekly 1-Point is before anyone else at my school! Why not encourage someone at your school to do the same?
Martin Werner Zander, Smith’s Partner
マーティン・ワーナー・ザンダー
Owner Smith’s School of English Kotoen
月謝制のスミス英会話 甲東園校 仁川校 逆瀬川校 西宮市
Alex says
Martin,
Thanks for putting this article up!
100% of the students at Smiths School of English in Fuse are now in the habit of checking the weekly online “mini-lesson” sentence prior to coming to class and preparing their own examples using the grammar pattern they have learned online.
Having all of the students using the same grammar pattern to prepare their own examples makes for an interesting start to every lesson as each student is interested to hear what the other students have written and they already understand the basic grammar because they have learned it online prior to the class.
I also have numerous students who regularly print out the new sentence and place it into a plastic folder thereby creating their own “mini-textbook” with which they can quickly review previous “mini-lessons” by simply flipping through the pages!
Having it online also makes it very easy for students to log on anytime and review previous sentence patterns.
I’m very happy with the online “mini-lesson” system and I’d be interested to hear from other franchisees also on their own experiences with the new online “mini-lesson” system.
Alex
Edward says
Martin and Alex,
Smith’s Ohtsu is also 100% online with the online One-Point system. Althought I haven’t specifically asked it of any of my students, most of them took the initiative to
(1)write down the One-Point in English and Japanese
(2)write down the example in English and Japanese and
(3)write down 1 or 2 of their own examples!
This energy and passion to study really makes the lessons so much easier to teach and the students can really utilize class time for verbal practice.
One other thing I do from time to time is assign homework to my students. Recently I have been asking them to write down 1 new example for each of the previous 5 weeks’ one-points. Some keen students have even turned this into a story or made related examples using all 5 one-points! KEEN!
Enjoying the online one-points,
Edward, SSE Ohtsu
Martin says
Alex and Edward –
Guys, thank you so much for the feedback and important additional information on this topic. All franchisees should be reading this!
Good work to both of you!
Martin