Recently I’ve really been feeling the big gap between bookstore gigs which last 50 minutes and have a broad range of teachers, and the real professional development workshops in which you really see a progression as the teachers improve. Financially as well, the free bookstore gigs attract good teachers, but also the ones who just want a free English lesson and never buy anything – and somebody has to pay for the room, the flights, the hotels etc!

So along with Maruzen in Nihonbashi and Macmillan Language House, today we’ve put together a full on 6 hour professional development programme for Saturday August 27th. There’ll be a fee on the day of 12,000 yen which means there’ll be no selling, and just ideas, techniques, tons and tons of games and basically improving your skills. It should be really, really good, and will be a great way to move up from the “English Teaching as a hobby”, to real learning where the kids have oodles of fun, AND get good! The day’s workshop will be in Japanese and I’ll have more details on the site soon.

I chose MLH to join up with today because they have a lot of really good material that joins on nicely from Genki English, for example the Finding Out phonics series for when the kids have got a handle on the GE themes, and the new Springboard readers series. Which I think may become the new “officially recommended” readers series, basically because the amount of FREE SUPPORT material is just amazing! Have a look at the new page I’ve put on the site for “Making Reading Fun“, there are not just mp3 files for all the books, but worksheets and teachers guides that have soooo many cool ideas, all for free ( I guess they’d appreciate it if you bought a few sets of books though!)

Then in the evening after a few beers I was up till 3 working on the new “Oyako Eigo” programme, which has cool phrases for parents to use with their kids ( written by my Mum!). It’s a big request and if I can figure out the budgets correctly, I’m hoping to have it free on the website.