This morning I was thinking back and it’s only a few years since AJET offered Genki English a spare room to put on an unofficial workshop after the main Tokyo Recontracting Conference. At the time the Ministry of Education didn’t even admit ALTs visited elementary schools. Hence there were no travel expenses and one time I even had to sleep on a park bench in Shibuya! So today having breakfast in the very nice Keio plaza, all included as part of doing an official workshop, it made me appreciate things a whole lot more.

Afterwards I had a few meetings and popped along to a couple of the workshops. The elementary school one was OK, but nothing particularly Earth shattering. The presenter decided to base things on the Magic Time course book. Although I know the authors and would highly recommend their workshops, I always find these types of books not really suitable to large groups of kids in elementary school. But the presenter did a good job of using activities and ideas where the kids didn’t need the text in front of them. Some of them were a little “school like”, but he certainly had the personality and energy to pull it off. A couple of the good ideas were:

“Masters & Genies” variation of Simon Says. The teacher is the master, the kids are genies. The teacher gives a command, and the kids do it only if it is followed with three big claps, like in the Aladdin movie. The story element makes it fun, I like that.
Give several kids the picture cards that appear in a song. When your card is sung, you stand up, hold up the card and all the other kids point to it whilst singing the line. I can imagine that would be good with the Fruit Market song, for example, or ones that don’t have obvious gestures.

It was also good that the presenter was stressing things like don’t just teach vocab, but teach phrases. Teach plurals first, and lots of recycling. Plus he threw in the very good idea of using a bit of Japanese yourself as a pre-emptive strike to stop the Japanese teacher translating every word you say!

It was a very specific type of workshop though, and it would be great if the ALTs had lots of these specific ones to see, but if this was the only workshop they went to this year, they’re probably missing out on quite a few things.

Thinking about this more, I was wondering why CLAIR don’t video all the workshops and make them available afterwards? I’ve suggested this a few times, but I guess it’s too much work. It would be cool to have a nice bank of all the best workshops over the last few years. But then again, the problem I always had as an ALT was that no matter how many times you saw a game or song presented, it wasn’t until you actually participated and felt the adrenaline going, that you “got it” and used them in your own classes!