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Saturday, May 9, 2015

PIGATE on the web!

In addition to this blog, we have a Facebook Group, which is located at

https://www.facebook.com/groups/PIGATE/

It's a closed group, so please ask to join.

We are still getting our internet ducks in a row, and we would love for you to join us on facebook, and we would also love to have people post to this blog. If you are interested, please let us know!

May Pigate meeting

The monthly meeting of PIGATE, the Kumamoto teacher training group, co-sponsored by the NanKyu JALT chapter, was held on Saturday (9 May) at Kumamoto Gakuen University, Building 1, 1F English Lounge.

This month's meeting revolved around reading.

Mio Ebara discussed Canadian approaches to reading education that she saw in her one year stay there while she was studying TESOL and conducted a reading lesson using Cinderella.

Tomomi Nishioka discussed Ken Toyama's English Grammar textbook presenting a number of examples from the text.

Hisao Kobori introduced his use of Extensive reading at his previous JHS (Shichijo JHS) and his attempts at his new school (Koushi JHS).

The meeting closed with the traditional summary by Takaki sensei.

Next month will be Hiroshi Fukushima, a PhD candidate at Kumamoto Prefectural University and Rick Lavin, a professor at the university, talking about shadowing for listening. Hope to see you there!!




Places to order Extensive Reading books online

There will be a summary of today's PIGATE meeting, but this is probably worth a separate post. There are 2 online booksellers in Japan that you should be familiar with.

The first is Englishbooks.jp and the second is ETJ's book service. Both offer a 20% discount and englishbooks offers free shipping for orders under 8000 yen and ETJ offers free shipping for orders under 10,000 yen. For the latter, you need to be a member of ETJ, but it's free.

This is, of course, great for small purchases, but if your school is trying to buy a large order of books, this can be a big savings and I encourage you to contact them directly.



One of 41 Women in TIME's 100 Most Influential People in 2014

Can you spot Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai in the line-up below? It's easy if you filter the TIME 100 display by age. She's one of only two under-twenties and the only under-twenty activist.

You can read what Gabrielle Giffords, a survivor of a different assassination attempt, wrote about Malala by clicking on the thumbnail photo of Malala in the TIME 100 display.

Interestingly enough, eight of the total eleven activists are women, and three of those eleven are from Asia. Do you recognise anyone else?
Image source: TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World in 2014

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