When I was seven or eight my Dad bought me one of those diaries for kids where you have to fill out details like “What’s your favourite food?” and “What’s your worst nightmare?”
I loved it. This was way before the internet, personal computers and social media and all that, of course. Just the idea that there was a place that you could record your innermost thoughts (do food preferences count as innermost?) struck me as so cool.
Fast forward almost half a century, and I still get a kick out of scribbling my thoughts in books. This made me think, even in this digital age, there is enormous fun and some value in recording your thoughts from your younger days for your future self to appreciate.
So I thought I’d publish a bunch of such paperbacks for the youngsters l have the privilege of teaching English to at my eikaiwa. Each book has 20 pages of questions and prompts appropriate for each age (and limited English ability). I used them with great success with groups of kids in our English camp held last month. If you have an English learner in your life aged between 6 and 14, I think they’d get a kick out of having one of these books.
The “This is me” series is available worldwide from any Amazon site but for ease of clicking, I’ve included the three most likely sites here:
This is me available at Amazon.co.jp
This is me available at Amazon.co.uk
This is me available at Amazon.com
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Patrick Sherriff is an Englishman who survived 13 years working for newspapers in the US, UK and Japan. Between teaching English lessons at his conversation school in Abiko, Japan, he writes and illustrates textbooks for non-native speakers of English, releases Hana Walker mystery novels, short stories, essays and a monthly newsletter highlighting good fiction published in English about Japan. Saku’s Random Book Club is his latest project to spend more time with books.
Patrick Sherriff 