Wow, you girls and and guys were astounding!    After seeing you all on Facebook and emails it was so good to finally meet so many of you and all at the same time in the same place, it was such an energising experience!!

The local primary school teachers were totally freaked out to see where had you all come from and how passionate you all were! 🙂

Thank you for travelling in from all over Italy, and flying in from all over Europe, and for all you amazing questions – you are seriously, seriously at the top of your game!

Here’s just a little bit of what we did! 🙂

– Task on the board before we start each session (saves you hours of teaching time each year!)

– The Agreement – so everyone knows the rules of the workshop – respect everyone, and always tell me when you don’t understand! 🙂

–Disco Warm Up – always go for the challenge!

– A quick tour around India, Africa, Thailand.

– What’s your name? song – strong eye contact and confident gestures from the start.

– What is “Shy” and how to cure it  + how to make diamonds not coal.

– Your mind controls your body,  but your body also controls your mind with Superhero gestures and presentation skills!

 Remember how I did it?

– Which then leads into video projects  – such as the amazing soup exchange!

– Vocal warm up  to protect your voice.

– How old are you?  (remember how I old I said you all were!) + Mingle game

– Efficiency, let’s learn the top 100 words first.  (I’ll blog the list soon! 🙂 )

Then after a very nice Italian  lunch ….

– Summer sports + clap, clap game  change just one word and you have the past tense!

– Pronouns song – remember how we did grammar just using gestures!

– Baby Dinosaur – for irregular past.

– Genki Korean to see what it is really like for the students!

– Better than the best of the best.  – always choose positive words at the end of the lesson- “I have to” goes to “I can!”

 

– And we finished off with the Indian students’ project, Do flowers fly

And Italian dinner….

Day 2!

Then if that wasn’t enough head exploding for one day, we went into day 2!!

– Good Morning song – I can’t believe how genki you all still were after yesterday! 🙂

– Secret Warm Ups – review everything & forget nothing!

– The Hammer Game and Lines Game to evaluate students in summer camps.  (Who’s going to win? 🙂 Genius!! )

– Doctor Doctor song and game

– 45 minute lesson plan and curriculum

– Plus Ninja Tips for goal setting  – what do you want to achieve with your camps and courses!

– Then a massive, top secret, closed door, no videos allowed session on how to get more students than you ever imagined.  A  few little hints are here  but I hope you took note of the gold that was in all the amazing advice from the other teachers there!

Ninja Tip:  The BBC have just done a great story about Nutella:

They could have played on different universal values like, ‘This is cheap, this is affordable, this can substitute chocolate.’ No, they played upon,’This is natural, it contains nuts so it’s better than those that don’t contain them.'”

 Remember you have no competition, no one can ever teach like you do.  Show the parents the emotion, the passion, the life changing experience you will bring to their children.    There are hundreds of android phones, but only 1 iPhone!

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– Good cat, Bad Cat  (Which did seem to never end, but you were all totally on the ball!)

– Where is it?  and I am a robot song.  

– And finally Genki Phonics – remember the sounds come from the kids and start phonics as late as possible!    (It was also really cool to hear all the “Woooo!” comments from the  Italian teachers  as we had so many UK, US and Australian vowel sounds in the room too!: )

Head exploding! 

Wow, that was a lot – and with so many chats and questions and stories in between that I hope you took notes on because there were so many!!

I had actually planned to premiere a few vol. 14 songs for you,  but all the questions you were asking were just fantastic, and all the advice you were giving each other was just pure diamonds and gold!

Thank you so, so much for being so passionate and putting so much into everything you do.

And a huge, huge, huge thank you to Monica for her herculean effort in putting all this on, and thanks to the school, the headmaster,  the board of education, our fantastic cameraman and all the local primary school teachers.

I hope you took away a few jewels of advice,  the names and emails ( + Facebook) of many new friends,  and memories of a wonderful weekend.

I know I did and I have no doubt that every single one of you is going to go on and upwards and do even more amazing things in the future.

Grazie mille, keep in touch, I’m heading off to workshops in Slovakia next weekend and I’m sure we’ll all see each other again soon!!

Be genki,

Richard