Thank you everyone for another amazing workshop in Kiev!  UPDATE:  And check the new tour dates now!

With a mix of new and experienced, private and government school teachers It was very different from the super smooth mega fans only Warsaw Workshop but by the end of the second day everyone was totally on board! 🙂

Ninja Tip:  When teaching adults, even very advanced ones,  make sure you do every lesson in the curriculum.  I didn’t do What’s your name? in the main teacher’s conference (because I thought it was maybe too easy)  but … because I didn’t do it some teachers were thinking it was OK to just sit there and have no eye contact! 🙂   So you really need to make sure you cover all the non-verbal skills with all the early themes.  Remember rule no.1 is “I can do it!”  and  skill no. 1 is …..

 

We managed to cover an amazing amount of material and along with the bookstore pre-conference the day before and the kids demo here’s just some of what we did ……

Friday Bookstore Pre-Conference.

 

• Whilst everyone was filing in we did the Rocket Launch  and I’m sorry
• Top 100 words of English
• What’s your name?  (this is why I didn’t do it the next day – big mistake – everyone needs to do it!)
• When is your birthday? + 1st, 2nd, 3rd Song (with slow motion fingers! 🙂 ) + “One minute to line up in birthday order”  game – great for adults who don’t know each other!
• More advanced topics with Better than the best  and of course to finish on a high note, the Superhero

 

Day 1 – The Teachers’ Conference!

Start off with the Disco Warm up + The Agreement

A little Power Teaching with “Class.  Yes?” and “Teach.  OK!”

Adding more words to the warm up with Eat Drink Dance,  then creative sentences (e.g. “fly to moon on a hippo”) and finally using the TPR Warm Up to tell the Harry Potter story!

• Ninja Tip:  Use this to evaluate the English level of mixed advanced groups 🙂
• How much? and the bargaining game
• How much do we have to teach?  The top 25 words of English
• Creativity with gestures then we tried  Vegetables – ASL – sorry about the internet speeds! 🙂
• Going from words to drama with Little Red Riding Hood’s “Grandma, Grandma Song” – that was very cool!

Then after lunch adding in one of the key English skills with Adjectives + Guessing Game – the first time I’ve seen everyone do it!

Rock, Paper, Scissors then let us do a few crazy minicard games.

Then taking things up another level to do the real video exchange projects   (Although maybe What does santa do? wasn’t the best choice 🙂 )

And How many days till Christmas?  with the Santa’s Helpers game. to finish off the teaching for the day.

Wow that was a lot!

But we weren’t finished as we tried to squeeze in as much of the 10x Your Income Coaching Program as we could in the extra bonus hour!

 

Day 2:  Kids & Phonics!

Yesterday one of the teachers’ problems was “What to do with students who are late?”   and today all the kids were here at 9:30 and at 10 we were still waiting for some teachers to arrive 🙂

So it’s a good job I started early,  just so I could get an idea of what level the kids were at with:

• Jumping Numbers – I’d forgotten how crazy kids get when you forget the 12 on this one! 🙂
• Then Eat Drink Dance leading in to their current lesson the present continuous What are you doing?
• And of course What’s your name? to get everyone (including the parents of course!) making eye contact.

After the Monkeys Disco Warm up, I wanted to try something brand new so I did the Little Red Riding Hood morning routines song.   Wow, that was amazing!  They loved it!

Then because we had so many teachers and so many parents it was a great chance to do the Soliders & Ninjas game.  Although of course I definitely renamed this as just the “Ninja Game” for Kiev!

It was amazing to see how good the kids were at Rock, Paper, Scissors – we had so many new kings and queens!

Then of course I had to do the most popular request, Superhero  and just 30 seconds to teach the Thank you song to finish it all off.

Again, wow!!!  Amazing kids and of course the main aim was getting the parents on board and that they have to help the teachers and be amazing role models too!

Speaking of parents we also had one of the most famous TV comedians in Ukraine in the audience ( I think I told him off at one point for not doing enough gestures 🙂 ) and it was great to hear that he said that this is how he wants his children to be taught English.   You can’t get better than a famous TV personality to get other parents on board!

Then it was a little feedback session before trying the

• Winter Sports + Great Barrier game (coming soon!)
• Then finally the teachers all got really into asking lots of questions as we went through why the old school is bad all the gestures and sounds of the Genki Phonics program.
• A popular request for How to get great teachers,  adults with Michel Thomas for learning Polish.   and making everyone happy with Thanksgiving Song.

 

Wow, wow, wow, that was a lot!! 🙂

As I say it was quite hard work getting everyone on board especially with such a mixed group.  e.g. in the beginning some teachers were thinking it was a regular conference they could just sit there and not move (not in my workshops! 🙂 ),  some teachers were ignoring the important personal development skills and insisting on moving too quickly to the higher skills (e.g. the kids this morning could do “present continuous” but blanked when I asked them “How old are you?” 🙂 )  and that we also had some great Genki English fans who wanted to do lots of  really cool new stuff!

So I certainly earned my money today,  but by the end of it everyone was on board with how we teach Genki English &  how it’s so much more than just the language skills.

Thank you to everyone for such an amazing time,  to all the teachers and the school for hosting us and of course a huge thank you to Nataly for organizing everything.   She was just like you and came to my workshop in Russia 3 years ago, decided she wanted to help the teachers and kids in Ukraine and so here we are!

Be genki,

Richard