This is the fourth ( or it could actually be the fifth??) time I’ve presented at the Okayama city Summer workshops. Through all these years there have been hundreds and hundreds of teachers attending, but even today for the vast majority of the teachers it was the first time they had seen Genki English live. Luckily though Okayama teachers are a genki bunch and most of them were already using Genki English methods, so that let me speed up my self intro to a quick 3 minutes and I had their trust pretty much from the start. So most of the workshop was taken up with doing two demo lessons. One very simple ( Halloween + Harry Potter then What are you doing?) then one higher level one “Where do you live?” + Where do you live Shiritori game. They were as genki as usual and they had lots of questions at the end.

During the first half of today’s workshops there was a Japanese teacher doing a presentation about her classes so the organisers asked if I could do a bonus hour session for the new ALTs who had just arrived. Although I have a full presentation for newly arrived JETs, it doesn’t really work in small groups so we just went through the basics of what to teach in elementary school, and a few techniques such as karuta ( the Genki English version), How are you?, Left & Right, basic TPR etc. The thing that really stood out was how fast the ALTs pick things up. Japanese teachers very often question and question things and take ages to get a new point, but the ALTs were like “Cool, no problem” and we moved swiftly on to the next.