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!