Yesterday, after having meetings all morning ( lots of new stuff coming up on the site!), in the afternoon I popped along to some of the ALT workshops to see what was going on. The first one was by an elementary school ALT, Stein Setvik from Nagahama City Elementary English Program in Shiga Prefecture, and it was really good. In past years they have been some terrible ones. One year the presenter told the ALTs they had to never speak Japanese in elementary schools, even at lunchtime or when lesson planning with the teachers! One other time the presenter handed everyone a print out of just about all the games on Genki English ( without asking me), and simply read through them in the workshop! So it was a relief to see a very good one this year.

I’ll put a link up to Stein’s handouts when CLAIR puts them online, but for now some of the very nice ideas from him and the participating JETs were:

Graduation Game: In the Gokiburi Game instead of evolving through animals, you start off at 1st grade and work your way up to 6th grade, before doing the conversation and rock, paper, scissors with the teacher in order to graduate from elementary school! The target language is, of course, “What grade are you in?”

Famous People: Instead of the Name Card Game, give each child a laminated A4 picture of a famous person, and a load of paper money. They meet and ask each other “What’s your name?” and then answer with the card they are carrying. They then rock, paper, scissors. The loser gives the winner some money ( you decide how much depending on whether you want to practise big or small numbers), and they switch pictures. They split up, find someone else and try it again with the name of the new card they have!

For the Monster Drawing Game, instead of the teacher deciding how many limbs to draw, one kid throws a dice and they draw that many.

Class word search. For older kids, or Junior High, try drawing a massive word search on the board. The kids come up and ring the words they find.

Greetings. Get the kids, one at a time, to walk out the front door of the class. Everyone says “Goodbye!”, as they walk back in the door at the back of class everyone says “Hello!”.

Hot, Cold, Warm, Cool. Send one kid out of the room. Hide a cuddly toy in the class somewhere. The kid comes back and has to find out where the toy is. As they move around the class room everyone shouts out “Hot, Cold, Warm or Cool” when they get nearer or farther away!

Anyway, those are a few of the good ideas I learnt, I’ll link up to the rest later. Thanks Stein, I’m sure you’ve helped a lot of ALTs this year.

And if you were in the audience and contributed any of the ideas above, let me know and I’ll give you the credit.