How are things with you? Well done to our students who took the Eiken test last week. There were many good scores and I know everyone studied hard and did their best, even those students who didn’t quite make the pass mark this time. The 2nd rank now has a writing section. It’s only the second time and they don’t publish detailed marking criteria so we’re unable to definitely grade them at this point. The results will be announced in two weeks and then we’ll have lots of writing samples and their grades which will help us the next time round and going forward. Writing work is something I’ve spending time on recently and many of my junior high and high school students are doing an updated journal homework series that I put together. We are always looking for ways to improve our students English, not only for their tests but for real world English competence.

October is always a busy month for us. The speech contest is about one month away and we’ll be deciding soon which students will be selected to compete. Next week we’ll take videos of our students speeches so we can fairly judge and compare them when we make our decision. Our youngest students are practicing songs, which they will perform during the speech contest. There are some videos of this on the members page which I encourage you to watch. Talking about the members page, Alan recently put together a video of the English camp from earlier this year. It’s a nice reminder/summary of what happened. If you like the look of it, the good news is we have already reserved a campsite for next year.

Halloween week is soon too. Get your costumes ready for lessons from Tuesday 25th to Monday the 31st, Halloween itself. I’m excited to see what interesting costumes our students will wear.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

Kevin