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, we didn’t have electricity. But we expected that. Recently I’ve probably become a little lazy, relying totally on the software section of the CDs where you simply hit a button to hear the words and change the cards, not to mention the animations for the songs. Needless to say the schools here aren’t going to have projectors nor PCs, so it was old fashioned Genki English flashcards and batteries in a CD player. I’m writing this whilst the phonics workshops are going on and the teachers are going great. Let’s see how they do with Genki English this afternoon!

The first thing for me was to see if they could actually do Genki English. I had had reports that the teachers were bored, boring, not at all energetic and it would be impossible to get them to sing or move around. Well after the amazing phonics session this morning they were up for anything and were as amazing as any teachers I’ve ever presented to. They perfected the songs, loved the games and got all the class control things. Songs wise we did What’s your name?, What’s the weather like?, Genki Disco Warm Up. It was basically a super long Genki English lesson for them, rather than a training session, but they were so happy at the end that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Genki English is going to be huge in India!