If you happened to live in Kagoshima ( or anywhere within an hour or two’s travel), today’s JALT Conference was certainly worthwhile. Although some of the workshops were a little dubious ( fruit basket!), some of them were really good and there were so many of them! Unfortunately two of the ones I wanted to see were also on at the same time as me, one about TPRS and one by David Lisgo about his phonics materials, but it was good to hear some of the others, especially the elementary school teachers problems and worries. The solutions are all out there though!

I had originally planned a higher level workshop with lots of the newer material as I figured it would be mostly private English teachers who would attend. But I was told on the day that in fact there were mostly elementary school teachers! Which is good, but I also had to prepare other things. In the event though the elementary school teachers mostly went to the other workshops ( the perils of having a non-Japanese name and people not believing I would do the workshop in Japanese eventhough I was one of the few who didn’t do it in English!). But the group I had were really good and there were lots of them. So we started off with the World Cup song, then Where do you live? with the Shiritori game, then Do you have any pets? using Sticky Fingers to show how to introduce vocab in a fun way, then the phonics song and a run through some of the articles on the website.

The trickiest thing was the time though. Recently I’ve been doing real professional development workshops that last several hours or days, in which you can really build people up from the ground level to being able to use everything. Today was only 90 minutes to which my normal tactic would be to show them some stuff then introduce the Superpack which has all the follow up training material.
But today had to be “non-commercial” which meant I wasn’t allowed to talk about any products, and hence couldn’t invite people to follow up at home. A little strange. So it sort of turned into a “Wow, that’s good. But that’s it?” type of thing, but hopefully some people will check out the website.

It was also good chatting to everyone there, one of the perks of being a presenter is that you get to hang out with all the other presenters, some of them are very famous and all of them have lots of interesting things to talk about!