Another two day workshop and as this school had had a one day workshop last year covering all the important basics, I just jumped into doing more advanced teaching methods and how to improve the efficiency of the lessons.

This school has also bought student packs of all the CDs and the Kids English set. As they have the student pack license, they could put the software onto the schools server and every computer in the computer room ( and classrooms!) can access the GE software. So we also spent an hour or so going through how to use it. i.e.

1) Choose a theme
2) Give the students 3-4 minutes to play on the “words” part
3) Give them another 3-4 minutes to play on the “game” part
4) Get everyone to reset the game then start all together.
5) See who can do it the fastest.

The points here are:

1) It gets them out of the “panic because I don’t understand” mode into the “Oh, there’s a word I know” mode
2) Everyone learns at their own pace
3) It’s a computer game so it’s fun!
4) It’s a computer game so you take risks in getting the questions wrong or right.

We first of all did the games as a review. But of course the teachers already knew all the English. So then we did it the other way, where you first introduce the new English with the computer game. This works really, really well as the kids have lots & lots of exposure to the language. Then when you eventually do come to do the song in class, they already know everything! To test the teachers we did the toughest computer game “The Monkey Family”. It took a while for them to start “thinking like a kid” but after the 2nd go they really saw how quickly they had improved.

Although they did enjoy the games & songs, they weren’t into any of the discussion points or asking that many questions. This confused me a bit, because usually after my “War Speech” which I give at the end of the basics workshop, teachers all always enthused to get on with the job. It wasn’t until the evening drinking party that I realised that this was the school last year where some dodgy guy was stalking around the playground with a knife and we had to cut the workshop short! Hence no war speech. Ah, that explains a thing or two. Right, OK, looks like tomorrow I’ll have to start with the basics again, but get them into actually teaching as soon as possible.
But you’ve got to show people the destination, otherwise they are bound to get lost.

If you’d like to add to this post, have a look at the Genki English forum.