Interactive Activity Ideas for Online Teaching

Quizzes are great tools to engage students. They can be used at the beginning of the lesson or end of the lesson. Here are five PPT presentations on different themes. Each theme contains 10 multiple choice questions with 4 possible answers. These can also be easily made into Kahoot quizzes. All slides have questions in English and some romaji to cater for wider language levels. Please adjust the level of Japanese and select the numbers of slides to suit your students’ needs.

In the situation where students are facing the screen all the time, they need to take some brain breaks. Exercises and songs are very helpful to boost students’ spirits during lessons. Here are two sample PPT presentations on Yoga and Songs With Hand Actions. All slides are provided with hiragana, romaji, and English translation so that students of all proficiency levels can enjoy the activities.

1. Enjoy Animal Yoga Poses!

Engage students with a yoga lesson using animal words. 

2. Enjoy Songs With Hand Actions! 

Students learn animal words through singing the Japanese children’s song, “What can we make from scissors, paper, rock?” to the music of Frere Jacques. See more SONGS AND HAND ACTIONS.

3. Hiragana Taikyokuken / Katakana Karate

Familiarise students with the shape of hiragana characters through the movements of Taikyokuken (Tai chi) and katakana characters through Karate moves. This is a good brain break activity to increase students’ awareness of stroke orders (left to right, top to bottom).

These are practical lesson ideas to create more teacher-student and peer-to-peer interaction, and to help students engage with the content presented on the screen, including how to start/end online lessons in Japanese, how to do a role play online, and how to use sound files in storytelling.