One of the other workshops I attended last week in Kobe was on storytelling in the classroom. Funnily enough when I looked at the name of the presenter, it was Hamish Buchan from the British Council. The British Council, in various countries, have been really great over the last year or so ( have a look at this link for a lesson plan they have incorporating the GE “Under the Sea” song), but my schedule has never matched up with Hamish’s in Tokyo so we’d not actually met until today.

The workshop itself was very good, it was great to see a professional workshop at the conference. He started out with basic Total Physical Response ( TPR) similar to the TPR Warm Up game. He then did a demo in Hungarian and had people split into twos, one giving instructions to the other. That was a really good idea.

Then he moved onto storytelling using actions and gestures. This is a style of teaching called TPRS which I’ve been looking into more and more after Gumby and CJ were talking about the benefits of it on the GE forum. Here’s a good overview from the main TPRS website. We started out with a story that went something like:

Mr Bean woke up
Mr Bean switched off the alarm clock
Mr Bean made the bed
Mr Bean got dressed
Mr Bean brushed his teeth
Mr Bean left the house
etc. etc.

The key with TPRS is that kids hear the words many ( several dozen ) times, all the while doing the directions, then eventually they begin to speak them. At this point we were split into twos to practise on each other.

The key is to keep it interesting enough so the kids are always paying attention. Here Mr Bean was the hook, other teachers use strange stories to get the kids paying avid attention.

The magic part of this lesson was that Hamish then played an actual episode of Mr Bean – “The Dentist”. In the video Mr Bean does everything the kids just learnt, but in a different order. It’s very funny and afterwards the kids can easily discuss the order of what happened in English! I just had a look on You Tube but they only have part of the episode, you can see it here.

We then moved onto a lot of other great activities. Including going through Eric Carle’s “Brown Bear, what do you see?“, and then using the animals that crop up to tell a version of the Big Turnip story. i.e. instead of the farmer calling for his wife, daughter etc. he calls for the “red birds”, “white dogs” etc. which are the names of the groups the kids are in. Both these books are hugely popular in Japanese schools, and it’s a great way to link them, and the English, together.

If you get the chance, I’d highly recommend the British Council workshops and next year they are planning on introducing a correspondence course for JET programme participants, which should be very worthwhile doing.