Australian Lesson Ideas

Here are some ideas (some tried and tested, others simply ideas) for activities to do with Australia you can do in classes at primary and junior and senior high schools in Japan.
Australian Slang / Australian English
Make a list of Australian English (including slang). Be sure that you can explain them all in simple English. If you need some help, there are plenty of Internet pages devoted to this topic. For a start, try http://www.oocities.org/Athens/6707/ozslang.html.

What you do with this list is up to you. Here are a few ideas:
* have the students to try to match up the Aussie English with the simpler English ("tucker" - "food") and/or match Aussie English with Japanese
* you can play Bingo
* you can make a wordsearch
* have them to do a skit in English and then have another group give the same skit in Aussie English

Australian Money
Ever noticed how cool Australian money is? There's a lot you can do with it.

Let's start with the coins - did you bring some with you? You can explain the meaning of "heads" and "tails" and get the whole class to participate in a "Heads and Tails" game until you get a winner - give them a sticker or something and they'll love you forever.

While you're on the coins, you can explain the animals on the coins (Japan's coins have flowers for the most part). Take some big calendar pictures (or similar) of Aussie animals to class to show your students.

The other thing you can do is play "Two-up". If you didn't bring a set, they are about $8 in any gift shop in Australia - ask family/friends to get you one.

With the notes, you can show the students that Aussie notes are plastic and that they are all different colours and sizes. You can also explain that they go through the wash OK and are hard to tear or counterfeit. In fact, did you know that Australia actually makes money for other countries?!
How to play "Heads and Tails"
First, you stand out the front of the class with an Australian coin and have all the students stand up. The students guess the result of the toss - hands on their head for "heads" or hands on their behinds for "tails". After each toss, the students who did not correctly guess the result sit down. The last remaining student is the winner.

You can have some students come out the front one by one and throw too - make them announce the result in a loud voice!

(Variation - use two coins and have the students put one hand on their head and one on their behind if they want to guess one head and one tail).
Web pages related to Australian money
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - a good description of the coins and a mention of the notes, although no pictures. http://www.csu.edu.au/australia/defat/currency.html

The Adventure Post Office - Send money from Australia and the Pacific Islands! This is mostly an entertainment site, but it does have great pictures of the money in case you don't have the real thing. http://www.adventure.simplenet.com/postcards/money/australia-pi.html
Travelling
This is more of an extended project. I wanted to try this with my students after we finished the textbook and before the end of school but there wasn't enough time. Perhaps you can squeeze a condensed part of it into your teaching.

Pick up travel brochures to Australia and/or NZ from your local travel agent. Get the students to look at them and write where they want to go and what they want to do (great for when you are studying 'I want' or 'I intend' etc). Then you can take it further and get them to plan an itinerary for their trip. You can get them to practice 'must/have to' by having them write a list of what they must do before they go. They can also pretend that they are in Australia and write a letter to their English teacher in Japan about their holiday or a thank you letter to the host family that they stayed with.

N.B. You can adapt this project to suit the English level of your students - give the younger/weaker classes more models to help them and less tasks to do. The older students can incorporate lots of different grammar points and (if you get some brochures sent from Australia as samples for them) can even try their hand at actual "travel" language.