Ah, this is what I like to do, sit back, relax and let everyone else do the work! Just as a teacher should get out of there and let the kids be the centre of attention, today it was the turn of the teachers of the school to practice teaching using Genki English.

Compared with other schools they picked things up very quickly, even after just teaching one theme each they’d picked up on the need to read the lesson plans, sort out who is doing what and to practice beforehand. Some teachers take ages to get that. Since CD7 has come out it’s no where near possible to do all the themes in one day, but they got through a heck of a lot of them.

Whilst I give a fair bit of advice on how to teach the songs and games, for the actual introduction of the language I usually leave it up to them. Each teacher has their own personality and techniques, and today they really made the lessons their own. Usually you have one or two “too much sugar” teachers in a school, but today just about all of them had their own ways of doing things which was great to learn from, both for me and the other teachers. One teacher did the “Do you like?” theme in Japanese first ( just to make sure younger kids understood the concept), then seamlessly switched to English, which worked great.

I also figured out I need to do an easy to teach remix of Creepy Crawlies. Since I remixed the others last year, it really stands out as being tough to teach!

But anyway, a really great day and I’m going to pop back next month to do a demo class for the kids. With teachers as good as this I want to help as much as I can.