Today was an interesting school in that when I was looking through their curriculum, I wasn’t cringing every two minutes, there weren’t any mistakes ( a very rare thing!), and there were actually some funky things in there, such as a nice reply to “I want to be a (job name)..”, “Why?” “Because it’s cool”.

However I made a bit of a mess of the workshop. Seeing what they had prepared, I went straight in to the “English is Easy” skit, thinking I could get it out of the way before my self intro ( which takes a while!), but…. they were just looking at me like “who on Earth are you telling us this?”. So I guess I have to keep the self intro first!! Once that was done they were cool, but just seemed very tired! I also think they tend to leave things up to the ALTs a bit much and are in a bit of a cocoon, thinking they don’t have to do anything themselves. But I eventually found their niche with the card game and mini card games!! It seems like they could play those all day! Which they did, until the male teachers got called out because there was a weird guy walking round the school grounds with a knife!! Nice and safe Japan, eh!!

But anyway, it seems the guy had disappeared ( or may not have been there anyway), and the teachers had learnt all the important stuff in the morning so I stayed with the girls and finished off with things like “When is your birthday?“. The full write up of everything we did is on the site here. One of the cool things were the teachers’ questions, for example “What to do for homework?” ( let the kids take home the mini cards to play with!) what to do with Special Needs kids ( most of the games actually work just as well with Special Needs kids) and how to get good at English themselves. To which the Headteacher promised to make the Wednesday teachers meeting in English – great!

The teacher here is again a really genki guy who does a lot of work for English education, so the school should do well.

Then to catch a flight back to Fukuoka for tomorrow’s workshop, and I’m flying from the new Chubu airport, which seems cool but a little badly planned!