Grade 2 Unit 3 How to Make a Wish

Here is a supplement to the Let's Read section of Unit 3. The kids are given the story of A Magic Box to read so I thought it might be interesting for them to learn about wishing customs of Western countries. Of course if you're not from a Western country this might not be so useful.

There's actually quite a lot of different customs concerning wishing. I did a little research and was surprised at how many there were. But keeping in mind that the kids are only in Grade 2 and the fact that there is a lot of grammar they haven't been taught yet I did my best to keep it real simple. It's actually quite hard to make things so simple. At the bottom of the page you'll see a box labelled Useful Words. All of the translations for the English phrases came from the new gadget on the blog the Google Translate. If you don't know a pretty fair amount of Japanese already don't trust the translations of multi-word phrases without checking the meaning with a JTE. As with all language translation software that I've seen so far sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't.

I don't think of this so much as a worksheet as a reading; something to get them talking about wishes and a way to introduce the grammar used for making wishes in English. If the JTE is willing I want to kids to go beyond just saying, I want a new basketball to I wish I had a new basketball.

I can dream can't I ?