I was thinking the other day that I should make this in to a real blog, talking about hot news and ideas. The thing is you look at the teaching scene and there isn’t really much going off, except for Dr Krashen losing any sense of credibility on the ETJ list by insisting speaking isn’t important in language classes. But then you look again at the” real” blogs and all they seem to do is to link to each other! ( Hey, look at Seth’s blog about genki people, or Michael’s blog about giving people 3 choices – might work in the classroom?)

So I might as well just write about what’s new on the site!

First up is an American set of pronunciations for the Phonics Pages. For some strange reason Genki English pops up as number 4 on the American Yahoo for “phonics” and hence lots of schools are using it to teach their kids, and similarly lots of teachers are confused that the “u”s and “a”s don’t sound like theirs. What I’ve found is that just about everyone pronounces the consonants the same way, but it’s in the vowels that the regional differences come out. If it was just a case of UK vs. US it would be easy to explain, but it seems like every city on the planet has different ways of saying the sounds, even if they are in the same country! But to go just a little way to help ( I’m not going to record them all!) I asked Joel record a set with a Californian accent to nicely compliment my Yorkshire tones! : ) I guess that’s a big beer I owe him, and from Monday morning lots of little Americans will be using his voice instead of mine, oh well!

I got the new New Zealand farmstay page up on the site, it looks very nice, I wouldn’t mind going myself. And also the discount airline tickets page.

I’ve also been doing lots of music work done this week, and as usual nothing works, then all of a sudden when you least expect it a great song pops up and is finished in 5 minutes. If only they could all be like that! So expect a funky new Summer Sea Song to pop up on the CD Owners Club over the next few weeks. And I’m also going to be looking at making printable versions of the songs and games pages with each activity on one sheet of A4. I’ve been planning to do this for ages but haven’t been able to decide which software to do it in. But I think it’s time to bite the bullet and just get it done, even if it means using Microsoft Word!

Other news, the Summer is filling up pretty good, I did get the gig in Okinawa ( yeah!!!), and the gig in Tokyo on the second of July is fully booked, but they’re going to to be looking at doing another run later in the Summer.

Right, tomorrow’s my day off so I’m off to watch Batman and I’ll see you all next week!