I’ve been here for a week, it’s my first time in India and haven’t really done any sight seeing. So it was really great today to head out into the old town on my day off. This is more like what I imagined India to be, with rickshaws, traffic, fumes, noise and masses of people…

As I mentioned before, today was going to be an optional thing, but all the teachers insisted on joining, even though it meant being crammed onto a non-air conditioned bus on non-made up roads to get here. And they were great. We did a few more songs, and they finally got the idea that the…

Today was the last day of the phonics training. It was also a half day. However we still hadn’t gotten the teachers to do much Genki English teaching on their own. So we split the class in two, with me taking one group and showing them how to teach one theme whilst the other group…

As expected day 3 of the training was much better. I decided to hold back on having the teachers do too much too soon on their own so concentrated on going through the basic themes such as Where are you from?, How old are you? etc. and making sure that the language, activities and context…

To keep things flowing, and also because we had electricity, I was on this morning with the phonics workshops in the afternoon. After yesterday’s storming success there was no problem that the Indian teachers could sing, play the games and be incredibly genki about it all. Today was to get them used to teaching themselves,…

4 days of workshops for 70 teachers, half phonics and half Genki English. Sounds fairly straight forward? Well, this morning was quite an Indian experience, just bordering on chaos but miraculously by 10:30 the room was full of very genki teachers, all in wonderful Indian dress, and everything was ready to go. Well nearly ready,…