I had a bit of a challenge this morning. Before the main show with all the kids, I had an hour with the three 3rd grade classes and their parents. Motivating adults is quite easy, and motivating 3rd graders is even easier, but not at the same time!! I starting off aiming at the kids, but the parents were like lead weights dragging everyone down. So I switched to focussing on them and the kids were off paying attention elsewhere. Eventually though things did settle down and we could get the warm ups of Rock, Paper, Scissors and Good Morning out of the way.

The whole point of these “Oyakoko” ( kids & parents) days is to get everyone working together so I was asked to do some games. That is a bit of a challenge with over a hundred people. So what I decided on was a massive version of the Stopwatch Circle game, with each class ( and their parents) being one team. One person on each team would start and ask the target English to the person next to them. When it got back round to the first person the team would shout out and the fastest one is the winner. I used the Banana Tree Game to keep score and let the kids choose which animals they wanted to be from the Pets Theme.

The problem was getting them into groups quickly enough, they were taking ages to get themselves into perfect circles. So the best thing to do to speed it along is to make it into a game! For the first time ever I actually used shapes in a class! Basically I introduced “Triangle” and “Circle” then shouted out things like “Rabbit team, make a circle”. After a few attempts of each team doing it separately, I said “Everyone, make a triangle and sit down” and they raced to do it quicker than the other teams. Which meant it was very easy to put them back into groups after each song. Content wise we only managed “What’s your name?” and “Thank you“, but the parents had a good time and learnt a lot about what elementary school English is like.

Next it was the rest of the kids in the school, nearly 400 of them. The school sound system also decided to pack in at this point, which wasn’t too good! But whilst the kids were filing in I played the Mr Octopus song. We had the projector set up at the front and the first and second graders were going crazy when the octopus, then spider then alien appeared on screen. You’d think David Beckham had just walked in the room they were so excited! So when that finished I played the Doctor Doctor animation and they went crazy for that as well! I actually thought about just leaving the CD playing for the hour, they didn’t really need me! But I don’t think the teachers would be too happy with that. As the kids were so warmed up already, it was a great show going through the Genki English World Cup Song, How old are you? and Mingle ( because the sound system had died and we couldn’t play any more songs!).

That was a tough, tough morning though, both with the parents and the lack of sound system. I was shattered.

But then it was time to move on to the next school. This is one of those small schools you find throughout Japan and the total number of students was 27. So instead of a show, I just figured on doing a lesson, well actually three of them in one hour, but still at “lesson” not “show” pace. And the kids were perfect. Rock, Paper, Scissors started off as usual, then we did “Under the Sea” with the Sticky Fingers game. I usually find that song works best for 1st & 2nd graders so I started off by saying to the 5th & 6th graders “OK, we’re doing this for the younger kids and you might find it a bit babyish, just help me out”, but they were more into it than the 6 and 7 year olds! The whole lot of them were coming up with crazy gestures, playing the game and singing the song really, really well. It was also good to show the teachers how to teach “I can see a whale” etc. then introduce a word such as “crab” and ask the kids to translate into English “Kani ga miemasu yo!”, building up the sentences like lego bricks. They were so good at that song that we also did “Do you like..?” and the new Food Karuta game. They were great on that, and even the 1st graders could ask me “Do you like…?” without any prompting. Excellent. I think that was about as near as you could possibly get to a perfect demonstration lesson. And after being shattered at lunchtime, I was all genki again at the end of the day!

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