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 Printable Lesson Plans Genki English CDs:  Volume 1  Volume 2  Volume 3  Volume 4  Volume 5  Volume 6   New CD Vol. 7   MP3 Songs |
Take any problem in the World and it's invariably caused ( or made worse)
by a lack of education. Too many kids hate school because it's too boring.
The aim of Genki Learning is to have all subjects in all countries taught
in a fun, engaging and effective way. There are already a few million kids
benefiting from this, and even a whole country where the government has
put it in all their schools. But there's still a long way to go!
While I'm on the road you'll hear about my travels & workshops, and
when I'm doing studio work I'll keep you up to date with ideas, updates
to the site and some of my favourite teaching resources. So if you want
to find out what's it's like behind the scenes or how & why I do what
I do or even if you're just nosey or a bit bored, have a read.
I'll update the diary as often as I can, so keep coming back. And of course
whilst I'm away, the office staff are always ready to send off your CD orders just as soon as you send them in!
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When I first volunteered to do some training in Thailand five years ago I had no idea how big this would all become. Now it’s 2007 and we have the job of training teachers in every single school in the country. With tens of thousands of schools it’s a big, big project to do. Of course as with any sustainable education project I’m not going to have to do it all myself!
The county is split up into 600 areas so this week we have had one teacher from each area come to Bangkok. Unlike many countries this was very much “professional development” instead of “teacher training” as they were really good teachers. The idea is they get a rough idea of what Genki English is all about, then head back home to train the other teachers who already have all the materials.
And they were great. The only weak link in the chain was me not having enough Thai to explain all the complicated stuff! But luckily we got around that as the new Genki English manual for Thailand is all in Thai, so we got the teachers to come up and read the passages. This worked really well in that it removed me from the proceedings quite a bit, which is always a good thing as the teachers themselves will be conducting workshops when they head back home. Plus it also meant I don’t have to worry about learning the Thai for things like “quantum mechanics” or “genetic engineering” (yet!).
Anyway, it was a physically tough week, doing so many hours of Genki English everyday at such a high speed is a sure way to lose a lot of weight, but the teachers were loving the songs and games and were getting really into the whole motivation aspect of what this is all about. The teachers who were here for the second time helped even more by relaying stories of their students getting penfriends abroad from the projects and how well the songs were working in their classes.
The next thing will hopefully be a tour round the provinces to teach smaller groups of teachers the more advanced stuff, and that means I might have to be here for quite a while next year. But what with the wonderful food, cheap prices ( I saw “Transformers” on Thursday on the biggest screen in Asia for about 500 yen!), and unbelievable genki teachers who really understand how education is important for their students, and I don’t think I’ll have any complaints!
I’ve got workshops all next week in Bangkok and today I popped in for the briefing session and I finally got to see the Thailand Ministry of Education’s and the British Council’s versions of the Genki English packs. They’ve actually come out really, really well!
The funny thing is that there is now an official Genki English lesson plans book in Thai before I’ve even finished the English version.
Actually I haven’t even seen the new CD7 yet myself yet!
Today we have a very nice game, in fact it’s one of my favourites, for use with the new Can you kick? song.
It’s basically just a modified version of the Do you have..? game, but it’s one of the easiest ways to get the kids practising “Can you…?”.
You do need a lot of mini cards for this theme, so if your budget won’t stretch to colour print outs, the kids are usually just as happy with black and white ones that they can colour themselves. It’s great colour and clothes practice ( e.g. what colour shall we make the shirts? What about the shorts?) Plus the best thing is the kids can take the cards away with them and use them for games in their lunch time. Of course sometimes this does descend into their own language, but you’d be surprised at how many of them continue to play in English - and they get so proud that they can!
One other great idea with pair work type activities is to let the kids come to the front at any time and check out how to say any of the words on the computer. They try to get as close as possible to the pronunciation and it’s also good for you to see just which words they are finding tough, and which ones are easy. Although actually in this theme pretty much all the words are easy!
Have a try at the Can you kick? Game.
The UK government have just published their new MFL ( Modern Foreign Languages) Scheme of Work for Key Stage 2. It’s very dense and very comprehensive and maybe a touch dry in places, but it should give you a few of ideas for whichever language you are teaching.
When you do school visits, you sometimes have bad days and sometimes you have good days. To be honest today didn’t start very well as I had to spend the first 30 minutes wiring up the schools broken sound system - I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve had to do that!
But then the first 1,200 kids rolled into the gym and everything went magically from there. This school is actually one of the Ministry of Education’s test schools and they are the school that is testing out the DVD versions of the Genki English CDs. I also did a two day workshop here two years ago and they have a fantastic lady in charge of the programme. And boy does it show! Even just in the setting up the kids were actually answering when I asked questions ( instead of the usual running away!), and were asking me stuff themselves, and not just “Say this to the foreigner” type things, but the normal things that kids ask me in Japanese.
The show we started out with Rock, Paper, Scissors just to check they all got the Genki English rules. They sailed through this, which is a bit cheating I suppose as they’ve already done it loads of times in their normal lessons. But I was also asked to teach a new theme that they hadn’t done yet and the request was for “How did you get here?“. This is a fun theme, but having all the grades together meant introducing the vocab is a little tough ( e.g. you need different jokes for each grade level!). So I just decided to whiz through the vocab and mini lesson and get them onto the music as quickly as possible, the para para techno music always gets them awake. And as was to be expected from a first run through a new theme after only 5 minutes they were a little lukewarm to say the least. Which is fine of course, if they could sing it all perfectly straight away there’d be no point teaching it! So then I came in with usual motivation talky bits and rule number two of “Try again!” came into play and we tried it again. And my goodness, they were amazing. Going from being quite unconfident and hesitant to blasting out all the words, including the chorus, with really great pronunciation and perfect timing. In fact they were so loud they broke the sound system. But no problem, these kids proved that they could tackle even a new theme straight away.
So then to finish off it was How old are you? and Mingle. Which like Rock, Paper, Scissors I didn’t have to teach as they already new it. And they did great. One nice touch is that the teachers give them cool hand gestures for the chorus and then only have them jump on their own age. At first I didn’t figure out what was going on, but afterwards I realised why there was this ripple effect from front to back!
Semi Immersion
Right, now it’s on to the second school before the teachers’ workshop this afternoon. This second school is trying things in a different way. Instead of introducing Genki English they are doing a semi-immersion class where they teach the music lessons all in English. Now I can’t really see how this works myself but it will be interesting to see how they get on!
This time we had 900 kids and no sound system set up ( “We thought you didn’t really need it so we set up the speaker in the projector machine for you”) hmmm. Luckily they had a several thousand dollar PA system at the side of the gym being unused ( after they were complaining they have no money!) so I rigged that up and it sounded really nice. When you have a nice sound system you don’t have to have things so loud, which can make the whole experience much clearer and much more like a movie. The show was OK but the kids lack of experience with Genki English showed through ( e.g. “Can you do it?” and half the kids go “No!”), so I just did the basic first step show. After that they were really good but the very nice head teacher came up to me afterwards and said “Wow, that was great. Was it the same content as this morning’s school?”. To which the answer was of course “no, they’re way more advanced” but I had to say that diplomatically of course. But this throws up the problem in this city that both these schools feed into the same Junior High School and there is a huge gulf in ability and attitude between the two schools.
Teachers’ Time
Most of the teachers at today’s schools had been to a two day Genki English Bootcamp 2 years ago and they were all well up to speed with few worries about how to teach English. There were however quite a few new teachers, but they very quickly got over the fact that I’m not going to take half-heartedness as a valid excuse and pretty soon their questions turned to practical things that they can fix, compared with general worries that are un-founded. Activities wise we did the Genki Disco Warm Up, Do you like? + the Genki English version of Karuta, and the new Time 2 song and game which they loved. Then it was finishing on why elementary school English and International Understanding is so important, which worked out great. They are a very good bunch of teachers.
After spending so much time abroad recently and hearing the same old same old stories in the Japanese press about how elementary school English hasn’t moved forward, I had sometimes had thoughts of “is all this working in Japan?” and “shouldn’t I spend more of my time in countries where they are more serious about education?” but going to this morning’s schools was confirmation that things are indeed moving forward and Japanese teachers with the right attitude can, and are, making a huge difference. So that’s good and it gives me the confidence that I’m not wasting my Summers doing all this training and the good teachers are taking a lot of ideas away and using them to great effect in their schools. Ganbare and keep up the good work!
One of the best things I like about Genki English is that as soon as I put up a comment on the Where is Baby Monkey? page that I don’t have a suitable game yet, people keep telling me about some great suggestions!
The best one was from Cesar and the Okinawa group last week, a super simple version of Clue ( or Cluedo). I’ve written it up as this month’s newsletter “Game of the Month”. It’s great in that you can keep it nice and simple, e.g. just family and rooms, or make it more advanced by adding in previous themes like What are you doing? to get the kids asking funky things like “Is Grandma Monkey dancing in the garden?”.
I guess you could also go crazy and add in another noun theme to make even longer sentences.
Right, I’m on the road again today, I’ve got a demo class for 1,800 kids on Tuesday! Wish me luck!
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