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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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Seeing as it was my second time in Nara this week I got quite a bit of press attention. Here’s the TV clip, which didn’t really say much, but let’s you get a feeling for the smaller 30 person practical workshops where teachers get to present themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMxkY-l3sq4
And here’s the Nara Shinbun newspaper article which is much better ( the reporter stayed for quite a while). It’s great to help persuade your school if you are thinking of planning a workshop. It also includes the very important 3rd rule of Genki English, which the TV company obviously didn’t understand a word of! How many times did they say “igirisu jin”?
If you’ve just arrived on the JET programme and have your first lessons next week, take a couple of hours to run through these pages, they’ll take away most of the panic!
Your first day at elementary school
What we are supposed to be teaching in Elementary school - it’s probably not what you think!
The same thing in more official terms
For the first lesson you could try a self introduction in the form of a true/false quiz. You start out with things like “My name is David Beckham” and the kids have to guess true or false. Then try a few more like “My name is Ichiro” ( famous Japanese baseball player). Eventually give your real name, maybe write it on the board ( the kids can’t read it, but it looks cool to them). Then try the same with your age “I’m 134 years old” or “I’m 6 years old”. Or with hobbies, you might have to use some Japanese to do this last one though! It gets the kids laughing whilst using English, and any photos or real things you have will really help the lesson.
Then once you start your main teaching, you’ll want to have a look through the online training video, which has a ton of ideas and hints to teach English to kids. Many of the Japanese teachers will assume that you are fully trained in how to teach English in elementary school and know everything about it! Oh yes, most teachers are shocked when I tell them that new ALTs only have 2 or 3 hours of workshops. On the other hand, although most Japanese teachers are fully qualified teachers they will have had hardly any training in how to teach English. Hence being patient and communicating is very important! For that have a look at ..
Classroom Japanese / Classroom English
You might also find that the school’s curriculum is a little odd. This is because many teachers will feel that they have to prepare something for you, but they really have no idea what to put in the curriculum so quickly copy something from a book. In that case you might want to try the Genki English curriculum. All the lesson plans, games etc. are all written in Japanese so it’s easy for you to print both and plan with the classroom teacher.
You’re going to love it, if you think like a kid and think what types of things you thought were fun at that age, you’ll have a great time. The kids will learn loads, get really good and unlike selling arms to Africa or anything like that, it’s a great way to spend your time.
There’s also lots more on the Help and Advice page.
I mentioned on my blog the other day that the Team Taught Pizza book was nearing the end of its stocks. As it’s coming up to the start of term when everyone is placing orders for everything then we sold out on Tuesday. Lots of people have been emailing me orders as it isn’t on the main order form anymore, but it really is sold out, and AJET tell me there won’t be another print run.
Polite requests by email are fine, and I understand your frustration, but please don’t send me hate mail about this.
Apparently AJET are working on a totally different book that may overlap with some content, but they are being a bit vague with dates, so I don’t really know when it will be available. Plus it will only get on the GE site if it’s really good!
Luckily though we do have the Altia Book for Junior High School, which is just as good. But I do realise it isn’t in Japanese so sorry about that. If you need Japanese explanations of junior high school games etc, then the main Junior High School page of this website is probably your best bet for now or if you have any cool ideas then please send them in.
Foxy Phonics is also very near the end of its stocks, we’ll probably run out in next week’s rush. AJET are working on a new Foxy Phonics book, and I hope to have some input on how to improve it, but that’s probably not going to be out for at least a few months, so if you need it now, get your orders in ASAP!
This year I also had 3 days of workshops in Gojo city, Nara… he’s how it went
Day 1 - beginnings
The main part of the training is the teaching practice, but in order to do that we have to, of course, go through all the basics, and more importantly how different Genki English is to what the teachers learnt in Junior High School. We also had teachers from all five of the Ministry of Education’s pilot schools in the prefecture attending. There was a lot of talking, but some good questions and everyone was pretty good for the teaching part. The school also had an interactive white board which was great for showing off the software.
Then in the afternoon the teachers got into groups, picked a lesson, read the lesson plan on the site and presented it to everyone else. About half the teachers had taken my course last year, so were pretty good. As usual the biggest problems wasn’t the English but how to use the internet! But the teachers quickly got the main points of confidence training, getting the pronunciation from the Genki English software, doing the song a cappella first before kicking in the music and then the game to finish. Although understanding how to play the games was pretty tricky. But they did better than most schools for a first try, in fact some of the teachers were really, really good.
Day 2 - 6th grade demo class + TV
Last year I did a demo class for 3rd and 4th years, so this year they wanted me to do one for 5th and 6th graders in a different school. Hmmm., not the best situation in the world! Whilst you can use the GE songs and games with upper graders, in many cases it’s like teaching a brick wall! That’s why I recommend doing projects in the upper grades, to actually use the language they’ve learnt in the lower grades. So today it was decided to try the School lunch Exchange. The only snag is that the kids have to have some English ability to do this, and I wasn’t sure if they had or not!
At the beginning they were in total “too cool for school” mode ( especially as today is supposed to be a holiday) so first of all I got them warmed up with Rock, Paper, Scissors. The song along with a couple of jokes got them talking and smiling. The teachers also seemed impressed at the kids change of reactions, which was also good.
The next step was to test their English, to see if they were up to doing the project. To do that I tried the Hammer Game. And they were pretty hopeless! They were very much in the head titling and “ehhh, I don’t understand” mode. So I sat them down for a bit of a pep talk and went through the “you already understand a load of English” skit, and after this they were actually quite good and enjoyed the game. And I also knew they at least had enough English to try the basic version of the project.
So first of all I introduced a couple of school lunch photos from the US and UK, and they were quite interested actually. Then I told them we were going to talk about, record and then send off info about their school lunches to kids abroad and their faces really lit up. Which was a big relief!! ( Although the Genki English songs and games have a pretty much 99% success rate, 5th and 6th grade projects have only about a 75% success rate!).
I put them in groups and each one had a picture of a school lunch that they had to describe. First of all I get them to try the easy words such as milk or rice or potatoes, then for the tougher ones I get them to think how to explain them in easy Japanese, then think how to say that in English. The word “mixed” came to the rescue quite a lot ( e.g. “mixed rice” for the picture on the left!) The point here is not to learn any new English, but to learn to use whatever they have. If they don’t know something, even something simple like “vegetables” is OK for now. Then in turn each group came to the front ( and this was in front of 30+ guest teachers as well), practised their menu once, then we recorded it. Now the class teacher will contact a dozen or schools in different countries from epals.com and hopefully get one or two replies for the kids in September. The kids were very much looking forward to it!
So that was a relief that the lesson actually worked!
In the afternoon it was back to the teachers teaching the normal lessons and again they did quite well, despite the TV news cameras poking in their faces! The biggest thing for me was just how quickly the brand new teachers picked things up. They weren’t here yesterday as they had prefectural training, but with only a few menus to rehearse they did a very good lesson. Obviously they had no fears about touching the computer, but I obviously it is much easier to learn how to teach if you start with a blank canvas, rather than having to completely re-learn the subject.
Then after a very nice onsen ( I’m staying in a hot spring resort this week, it makes a bit difference to the horrible Sunroute hotel in Okayama on the weekend, but not as good as the Okinawa beach last week of course!), it was out for dinner with the teachers. The Junior High Teacher also came along and it was great to chat about JHS English. Hopefully we can come up with some cool projects in the future!
Day 3 - Billy & life begins…
Unlike most schools we hadn’t really had any bad lessons this week - until this morning! First off it was “I have a question“, but the teachers had been practicing with the wrong software! Then Creepy Crawlies where the “What’s that?” and “What’s this?” were causing no end of problems, I am going to have to do an easy to teach version of that soon. Then one team did “What would you like for Breakfast” with the “Bad Fruit” game. One of the teachers is at a government test school and they have to do shopping as a demo lesson in November. But it just takes up so much time to set up a “shopping” style demo lesson. The Bad Fruit idea makes it more fun,which we found today, but I think if you have to do shopping you might as well just do the How much? song and the Bargaining game as the kids love it and it’s easy to do in one lesson ( with practice!).
But all the teachers worked really hard and picked up on the idea of re-using English in other themes. Last night I also revamped the curriculum page to reflect this.
Then in the afternoon it was picture books, hip hop stuff and a few more themes which became really, really easy to teach with just a few minutes preparation. If we had finished yesterday everyone would still have been “eeehh, that’s too hard” but doing the full three days means you really do finish on a “wow, that really is easy” mode, and finishing early made sure everyone went home on a big happy high note.
One funny thing was that during the chorus of a lot of the songs the teachers were doing Billy’s Bootcamp style aerobic dances. It’s usually tricky to think of gestures for the chorus parts of songs like “Do you have any pets?“, but as Billy Blanks is so popular in Japan at the moment, the kids love it and it really makes them look forward to the chorus and to even want to sing the song again and again.. But the newly arrived ALT was looking at us with a face that just said “Dude, what are you all doing?”. I guess if you haven’t taught kids before it might all look a bit strange!
Anyway the teachers were all really great, and eventhough they invited me back next year I think they’ll be just fine on their own. If they do need some topping up I’ll gladly pop back for a workshop, or a full 3 day course for other teachers, but this week’s teachers all did remarkably well and I’m sure they’ll do some fantastic lessons. Having time to show the full range of Genki English and especially all the self development and importance of education ideas is really good. At the end of today’s lesson one of teachers said that at 53 she was thinking her life was beginning to wind up, but after taking the Genki English workshops this week she realised she has much more she can do and said she had completely revalued her life. Wow, you can’t ask for much more than that!
This time last year I was in the same school as today and the teachers were panicking as they were convinced that from April this year they would have to teach English on their own. All sorts of publishers were pushing out well dodgy textbooks and although teachers were panicky they were actually knuckling down and getting ready.
Cut to a couple of months later and Japan had a new Education Minister who almost immediately said that elementary English education isn’t needed in Japan and proceeded to follow this up with all sorts of strange proclamations including that Japan was in a state of “human rights metabolic syndrome” especially with regards to minorities. Hmmm.
Hence this year there’s a distinct cooling in teachers’ passions for English.
After the recent election everyone was looking to see who the new education minister would be. Although English, or rather International Understanding as the subject is really called, could never become compulsory too quickly, it would be nice to have someone who was more positive in the role.
So today the results were in, and the new Minister is ….. Ibuki Bunmei - the same guy as before!
So that means English won’t become compulsory for quite a while. But it does mean that the best teachers are still free to teach to the best of your abilities in the current framework, so for the kids’ sakes, that’s what we’ll do!
PS I’ll write up today’s activities when we’ve finished the 3 days. Plus have a look for Genki English in the Nara Shinbun newspaper tomorrow!
If you’re been called in to help with the provincial Thailand training workshops this week then thank you very much! I’m really wanting to make sure this project works as well as it can, so I’m very happy to support you in any way. Here are a few ideas that may help.
Presenting to 100s of teachers is tough, but the Genki English materials are designed for large groups, so things scale very easily.
With 200 teachers you can’t really do much “individual teaching practice” as such as there are just too many of them, so I usually just go through several of the lessons and mix it in with lots of motivation talking.
Your biggest challenge will be to make sure there is a big enough sound system that sounds loud even with all those people.
If you have a computer and projector things will be quite easy.
I usually start with a bit of TPR warm up then one of the really simple songs like “What’s your name?” or “How are you?“. Once everyone was relaxed I’d put up on the projector the first instructions page of the Genki English Teaching Book ( in Thai of course), and get one of the genki teachers from the front to come up and read it to everyone. This gets them into the way of thinking we’ll need.
Then choose a new song, bring up the page in the teaching book in Thai on the projector screen, get a teacher to read how to teach it ( not the game yet, just the song), then run through the words, then Mini Lesson on the software CD. Using the book means all the actions etc. in the song are in Thai so everyone understands. The translation is pretty much directly what I wrote in the English version, but is designed to be funny so don’t be surprised if they start laughing part way through!
Then check to see if they are OK, get them motivated to sing nice and loud, then play the song from the software. It’s important to do the words with gestures first, then the mini lesson before doing the song. If you do the song first they’ll just get lost, but if they practice it in the mini lesson ( maybe even twice) they’ll really enjoy it when the funky music kicks in. They should all be nice and happy then!
If you look at the individual song pages on the website there are photos etc. showing how to do all the, very important, gestures which you might want to have a look at beforehand yourself.
I’d also recommend you try teaching each song and game in the mirror beforehand to iron out any problems.
Next is to get someone to come and read the classroom game explanation from the book ( again in Thai and again on the projector screen) , then for them to try the classroom game together. ( Note this is different from the “game” part of the computer software). In the songs they learn the new English, in the game they practice it.
For 200 people try and choose themes where the game doesn’t need any extra materials, otherwise you’ll end up spending half the time handing out cards/worksheets etc.
Then simple rinse, wash and repeat. Near the end I put up the final page of the teaching book and get a teacher to read it, it’s a huge confidence boost for them. Then end with the “Thank you” song.
If you don’t have a computer and projector you’ll have to have picture cards printed for each theme you want to do and all the teachers will have to bring their own copy of the teaching book, so if you can I’d say a projector is very important!
All 32,000 elementary schools in Thailand have the CD packs, books etc. but distribution is sometimes a bit of a problem and many of them may be held in the Director’s office, so tell them to have a look in there.
Motivation wise I tend to just concentrate on the main two rules of Genki English
“Can you do it? Yes, I can!” and
“Losing means try again” ( for the games).
The Thai teachers are usually great, and with just a little confidence building and letting them know that mistakes are OK they’ll be fine . I get them to stand up and sit down really quickly at the beginning, then trick them by saying “sit down” whilst raising my hands. I then do a shocked face, then relax and say “mistakes are no problem!”.
Please email me for anything else you need, either materials or advice. The Thai teachers are always so grateful to see how the ideas work and the kids love them , so your hard work is very much appreciated. Thank you and good luck,
Be genki,
Richard
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