What a year it has been for the English program here at Sagano High School! We made a lot of changes this year to our program to help prevent the spread of the new coronavirus which causes COVID-19, so we would like to let you know about all the changes we made to our classes to keep everyone safe and continue our great communicative English programs. 

Masks, Ventilation, Alcohol Hand Spray
It is important to note that all students were asked to wear masks during all classes since they would be speaking out loud. This is a key feature, and we hope you will notice all the masks in the pictures. Next, the windows were always at least partially open to allow for the air to circulate. You can see in the pictures we luckily have many windows in the language lab (LL). Finally, because shared devices were used (and also to be safe) alcohol spray was provided by the entrances and exits of all the rooms and the students were required to cleanse their hands before and after each activity. 

Room Configuration
In order to make sure everyone could be socially distanced during our classes in the LL, we first measured out where the desks could be placed for all of the different activities that we do. If there was a theme for the 2020-21 school year, we could say it was "Moving desks". We realized in order to easily move the desks each time we should make markings of some kind so that it was easy to understand when we had to quickly change between classes. We decided to use different color masking tapes on the floor. For example, red marks were for a regular 40 desk lecture setup. Pink marks were for small group listening style classes, yellow triangle marks were for poster session presenters, purple x marks were for poster session audiences, and so on. You can see some of our markings in these pictures. 

Regular Lecture Style
During regular lecture style setup, desks were positioned so that the students were 110cm apart from each other, which was the rule. All students were reminded to face forward and asked not to move their desks towards each other, even when they had to talk with the person sitting next to them.

Conversation Tests and Interview Tests
We regularly give students conversation tests and interview tests and we pondered how to do this as safely as possible. The first decision we made was to eliminate the passing of papers, so that students were not touching items that were previously touched by other people over and over. So their entrance tickets were made smaller and disposable, so that they just threw them away in a small trash bin after they held it up for the grading teacher. Then, instead of handing over their paper rubrics, all of the rubrics were computer based, inside of Google Classroom. Therefore neither of the students or the teacher had any kind of physical contact. All chairs were placed at least 2 meters apart, so that they would be extra safe.