Academy curriculum EFL eikaiwa JHS junior high school language courses materials publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
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The Fluency Course 2022
Is finally available on Amazon
I can’t believe this day is finally here. After six(?) years of writing, testing, re-writing, and figuring out how to publish and sell it without driving ourselves and our staff crazy, the B versions of all our textbooks are now available on Amazon in their final form.
Incredibly, we’ve made a lot of improvements to this latest (final?) version. We added a dictation activity to the first year books, made a simple change to the second year writing practice that should make a big difference to student results, and transformed the third year textbook.
I think our current users are going to be very pleasantly surprised, and new ones will just think the books were this good from the beginning 😉
We use the B books from October with our students, so we’ll have all the free supplementary stuff up on the Fluency Course website before then.
We’re also hoping to have the final versions of the A books up on Amazon/our site by the end of the summer, at which point I’m going to take my writing partner for a nice meal and we’re going to take a week or so off.
Would be really grateful for any help you could give us with promoting the course, telling people about it, leaving Amazon reviews, etc.
Please let me know if you have any questions! For people buying the course for their students, I would be happy to jump on a Zoom call to answer your questions or run you through how we use the books.
Fluency Course Blog
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The Fluency Course site now has a blog, and the most recent post might be of interest.
Academy curriculum junior high school materials publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
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Fluency Course Website
Finally
We finally have a dedicated website for the Fluency Course materials. It’s very embrionic at the moment, but eventually will have digital samples from all the books, teacher guides, order forms, etc.
I will still post updates here and write about how we are running our Academy classes, etc. but for the latest information about the Fluency Course textbooks please go to our website.
Academy curriculum JHS junior high school language courses materials publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
leave a comment
Fluency Course Evolution
Kaizen, kaizen, kaizen
Another month, another evolution in the Fluency Course. We’ve been playing with professional printing and design, and in the course of that have figured out that we probably need to change some of the components of the Fluency Course.
We started out with monthly texts for the students, which worked well but were time-consuming to print and somewhat fiddly.
Then we moved to 4-month texts, which worked well as the content for years 1 and 2 levels up every four months.
However, once we take printing costs and possible end uses into account, it seems to make sense to split each year of the course into two 24-unit volumes.
Not only will this reduce the cost of printing considerably, it will also allow some schools to use a single volume with their students, working at a slower pace or maybe splitting each unit over two weeks.
They could also use 1A with first years and 1B with second years, for instance, or any other combination they like.
After this change, the components of the Fluency Course are as follows:
Fluency Course Level 1
Printed materials:
Text 1A -24 units, approximately 220 pages
Text 1B -24 units, approximately 220 pages
Workbook 1 -48 units, approximately 110 pages
Free downloads/printables:
Teacher manual
Quizlet files (48 units)
Audio files* (120 texts)
Student record sheets (12 monthly)
Student reference sheets (12 monthly)
Conversation cards (240 index cards -one set needed per 2 students)
*audio files not yet available
We should have some prototypes of the professionally printed materials by the end of this month. Exciting stuff!
Academy curriculum junior high school language courses publications publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
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The Fluency Course 1 Video
Component Introduction
I promised to make a video introducing the Fluency Course materials for people considering helping us trial it.
So, er, here it is. Please forgive the shakiness, I was holding the camera in one hand and manipulating the materials with the other 🙂
Here is the full list of materials:
- Question Cards: 20 per month, you need one set for each two students in the class
- Reference Sheet: one per student per month
- Workbook: one per student
- Textbook: one per student
- Record Sheet: one per student per four months
- Verb answer sheets: one for every one or two students
I hope you found that useful. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!