Hachijyojima - Back to school & 3rd graders from Mars…

March 15, 2006

After the past few months of doing computer work it was back to the fun part of Genki English, actually using it in classes! Today, instead of a simple kids show, I had three demo lessons. Each one would have two grades and I’d try and do as much as possible in the time, so it wouldn’t be a true “example” lesson, but should hopefully give the teachers some ideas as long as they knew they didn’t have to do it quite so genkily in their normal weekly lessons. . This school has been doing English for a while. They haven’t used Genki English yet, but have some good ideas with materials based on, for example, the “Shingo Pera Pera” station book, which apart from the use of katakana is actually a good source of material and phrases.

First lesson was 5th & 6th, well you might as well get the toughest out of the way first! I’m not always comfortable about 6th grade lessons, as unlike their younger counterparts, it’s impossible to guarantee a given lesson will work. But with today’s kids I need not have worried! They were all very genki, and also quite cold so were more than happy to start off with genki stuff like the Good Morning song. Then after everyone was warmed up I did a bit of confidence building with them ( to stop them from using “Eigo wakaranai” as an excuse!). The teacher had requested the What do you think of …? song, but they were showing signs of quieting down when I introduced new stuff, so I decided to keep it genki and go with the “I can do it!” song, which worked great and had them leaving the classroom with “I can do it!” flowing around their heads.

Then the next lesson was 1st and 2nd, and it turned out to be as perfect a lesson as you could ask for. Well, actually it was two, I did How are you? with the monster game which was good. They’d already learnt the “How are you?” question, and all I had to do was fix the “Fine thank you, and you?” rote answer that a guest teacher had instilled into them. The funniest part was when I asked them what the favourite food of the monster was and one kid shouted out “Melon!”. Then we went on to do the Under the Sea theme with the sticky fingers game. They really nailed that song in only 15 minutes so I was very impressed. Going through the vocab looked like it may tax them a bit, but as soon as the song came in they became all genki again and were singing along to the “What you can see, under the sea?” lines without me having even taught them! Nice.

Then it was the 3rd & 4th grades, which are usually the best grades to teach; they have some experience and English they can use, but are still genki. However I’m not entirely sure what planet these 3rd grade kids came from. The 4th graders were usual genki, but interested, 4th graders, the 3rd graders acted like they had bought up a year’s supply of Starbucks Lattes and drunk them all that morning. The plan was to do “Rock, Paper, Scissors“, then to try the new “Do you have …?” theme and finish with the Gokiburi game. It started off OK, but as soon as I started to ask about the pets ( it’s always good to ask them and then pull out the picture card if that pet crops up, rather than simply teaching them in order), and they went mental, shouting out and going completely over the top to let me know their own pets! Now that’s cool, I’m very happy to take the kids enthusiasm and channel it into learning the stuff, but if I had gone into the gokiburi game it would have descended into a total riot!! The 4th graders were also quite normal and not too over genki, so I figured I’d just calm the class down a bit. Usually I have 3 techniques for doing this. One is to introduce “Good night” into the warm up game, where they go to sleep when you say “good night” in between frantic rounds of stand up and sit down etc. The idea being you gradually increase the time spent “sleeping” and as their heart rates slow down, they get a bit calmer. But these kids were having none of that, and even after lying still for ages just bounced back!! So to plan B, tire them out!! So we did 10 sets of jumping whilst counting to 12, and another set of 10 karate punches, and even more jumping, shaking and moving around and they still had enough energy to rival a small nuclear power plant. These kids were untireable!! Usually in a lesson my plan C would be to do some colouring or worksheet type things as that usually works, but today I didn’t have anything prepared. So I decided to just go with the manic genkiness flow, scrap the lesson plan and do “How old are you?” with mingle And even with all that jumping up and down they were still mega genki and bouncing off the walls at the end of the lesson. Wow, those were some very genki kids! I had school dinner with them at lunchtime and had to check the class teacher wasn’t pouring bags of sugar into their rice.

Then in the afternoon it was the teachers’ workshop. Most of the usual things came up, but also some interesting new questions. There were also requests for activities that don’t require any preparation so in between the problem solving we did Newspaper Sumo, Leapfrog ( with the “Do you have …?” theme ) and Lines. They were also impressed with the projects, and were really, really good teachers.

So it was a long day ( and I think I should market the stuff as “Genki Dieting” with all the weight I’ve probably lost moving around so much today), but very cool in a very nice location with great people. Then a quick shower in a great hotel ( views of the sea & volcanoes!), and a very nice dinner!