April updates

I hope you're well! This has been an unusual year, to say the least. The decision to close many schools across Japan seemed like a drastic step at the end of February, but in April it seems like it may not have been enough. It's tough to write anything about the pandemic now - who knows what will happen in a week's time!

Depending on where you are in Japan, you may or may not have classes at the moment. If you do, you might find yourself with new limits on where students are seated and how they can interact with each other. I made a tag for social distancing for activities that take this into account. If you have an activity that would work well with these rules or want to edit one to take them into account, click on the "Edit Tags" button on the activity to apply this tag to it. Do you have any advice for how to adapt general classroom activities for social distancing? Feel free to leave a comment if you do!

There's a new crop of elementary school textbooks this year which were to accompany a more advanced curriculum for 5th and 6th grade, but the pandemic has probably disrupted that significantly. Some kind teachers sent me some textbook listings for the new textbooks, but I haven't been good about entering them into the site. I've added a few, which you can see from the Textbook page or Elementary School page. Without a physical copy of the textbook in hand, though, I haven't been able to confirm what each page or chapter is about. Some of them are a bit ambiguous, so I wanted to put out a call to anyone who's working in Elementary and has time to help out. If I've listed any page entries with a question mark and you have an idea of what topic or grammar point the page is covering, please feel free to drop me a line and help me correct the listing. Just e-mail me at jake.alt.dev (at) gmail (dot) com and I'll try and get it fixed when I have a chance.

ALTopedia's second anniversary is about now, but it feels like a bit of an inappropriate time to celebrate. I hope we can get back to a point where there's time to think about things like this. As always, I thank everyone who's come to visit the site and contribute to it. I hope I can keep expanding it and giving you cool new stuff to check back for in the future! Take care!