Today’s workshop in Shizuoka went very well – and on the same billing as Abba!

It’s always great having fans who use Genki English in the front row because when other teachers say “Oh no, that won’t work with my kids” the fans turn round and say “No, no, it works great! We use it all the time!”. That makes me happy as well!

Content wise, along with a load of questions, we did:

* Genki Disco Warm Up
* What’s your name? lesson (but in German so they get to feel how the kids feel!)

*One of the requests was for ideas for teaching babies from o to 1 year olds.  My recommendation for that age is either lots of listening with lullabies (esp. if they have actions) or even better, baby sign language.  And we did my “More Milk Please” song.

Then back to Genki English I wanted to get into the “What do you think of…?” theme which is so popular at the moment. So to do this I did:

1. How are you? Lesson (so you have things like “I’m happy”, “I’m good” etc,)
2. Pronouns Lesson (to then get things like “He’s happy”, “She’s hungry” etc.)
3. Then we did the new “Look at me!” song, it went very well as you can see in the video!

4. Once we had that it’s easy to do the “What do you think of …?” Lesson (so you can get the kids to say things like “I think he’s hungry, but she thinks we’re tired!” – which is a pretty great accomplishment for 4 hours of lessons!

To introduce the theme I show my iphone then ask in Japanese “What do you think of this?” to which someone will say something like “good” So you can introduce the phrase “I think it’s ….” and then the next words in the song, “cool” and “excellent”

Then you can ask about a boy in the class, saying (in the kids’ language) “How do you say “I think he’s great” in English?” To which the kids usually say “I think it’s great!” so then you introduce “He” and “She” from the previous lesson.

Then I usually just let the What do you think of …? mini lesson (from the software) to introduce the question. It works a treat!

And here’s the song!

We also did the What time is it? Part 2 song then the game …

Finally I wanted to show the Computer Games from the Teacher’s Set. As usual the teachers were bored with the ones in English (just the same as 6th graders get bored with too easy English like “apple” or “dog”) but they magically came alive when playing the same game in Korea i.e. they were actually using the computer games to learn something!

But they just couldn’t make the link between how much they enjoyed learning the new Korean and how much their students would enjoy learning the new English this way! Many were like “It’s amazing for us! But not for my classes, no…..” Ahhh.

Anyway, it was a pretty good day and everyone was very Genki with lots of questions, especially from the teachers who use Genki English regularly, which was great!

Then a rush to get the bullet train up to tomorrow’s workshop, and just wait to hear what they had to say!

P.S. Any requests of things to video at this weekend’s workshop?