These days you have two choices with learning English.   Either the hard long slog of years and years of hard work (like the students in China who have to memorize all 181,000 words in the dictionary!)

Or, luckily, lots of very clever people have developed pathways that get really great results with much less time and effort.

i.e. saving students’ brain power (and the teachers’ time)  for the really tough stuff.

Working hard vs. working smart.

Some of these “smart cuts” are even instantaneous.

For example if you can show Japanese students that they can already understand (but not yet speak) around 300 really common English words (it works the other way round too) or that French or Spanish speakers already know hundreds of English verbs (taking out the “false friends”) then it is a huge confidence boost and more importantly lets the students construct amazingly impressive sentences really quickly.    ( Michel Thomas was famous for having his students figure out how to ask “What do you think of the economic and political situation in France at the moment?”   And this was after 2 lessons with him!)

Another one of these is the use of the word “not” which doubles the amount of adjective expressions you have available.

Adding in Genki pronouns to your curriculum early is also a fantastic way to this.  Suddenly the 8 phrases in the Genki How are you? song becomes a rather impressive 56 new sentences that even the youngest students can very easily make!

Again, huge confidence boost + massive word of mouth from the parents 🙂

So today, is a quick hack for the past tense. 

We’ll do it with the Genki Summer Sports lesson and it’s starts off very simply with “I like …..”  with some summer sports.

So far, so easy.

But then ….. you flip “I like” to be “I went”

Just one change of word.

Dead easy.

However your students can now answer the question “What did you do in the summer?”

With just a few minutes learning!

Which sounds VERY impressive to parents and co-teachers! 🙂

VIPs can check out the lesson plan here.

And for those of your with the Teacher’s Set all loaded up and ready to go,  try pressing the “e” or “r” buttons on the keyboard to get some surprises 🙂

Ninja Tip:  99% of English is the same between British, America, Canada, Australia etc.  however where there are big differences we usually have extra versions in the software.  So here you can press the American flag to get “favorite” and “Horse back riding” if you prefer 🙂  

Be genki

Richard

P.S.  For those of you on the fence about the buying the Teacher’s Set this week,  check out this amazing comment from Gavkhar on Facebook. Thank you Gavkhar, this is so good to hear!  Of course she is awesome and put all the training into practice to get those results, they don’t just happen automatically when you buy the set 🙂  And you can see many more teacher’s stories about their Genki English success on the Genki Teacher’s Set page!