The teachers at this school were so good in Summer that I promised to pop back in term time to do some demo classes for their kids. The teachers were already aiming high and I wanted to see just how good the kids could get. Obviously this is a fantastic school ( even though it’s in the middle of nowhere) but the 5th grade demo lesson was as close to a perfect model as you could hope for.

As the kids already had some experience it was great to try something that builds on what they know, rather than just doing basic things. The theme that was chosen was “What’s your favourite…?“. I was quite happy about this as it’s something we’ve been talking about a lot in the CD owners forum, and I wanted to make sure my faith in how much the kids like it wasn’t misfounded!

The warm up / review was to be “Do you like…?” But first of all I had to figure out how genki the kids were.

There was no problem, they were so genki we went through the “Good Morning” song as a greeting – complete with all the jumps. After a week or so of computer work I think I needed the exercise myself!

Then into Do you like…? which they already knew and reviewed very easily. The only tricky, but good, thing was that these kids were all fine with expressing their opinions and were quite happy to have a mix of “yes”s and “no”s. Luckily I’d prepared some “weird food” cards so we could all practice “Yes, I do!” and “No, I don’t” together. ( I’ll put these on the blog later this week)

One main point is to show the kids an item and ask them “How do you say “…. ga suki desu ka?”” and they give you the question. To practice this I had a run through my version of the “Gorilla Game” ( as they were so genki!).

Gorilla Game

1. The kids gather at one side of the room.
2. The teacher holds up one picture card and the kids have to make a “Do you like…?” question out of it, e.g. “Do you like fish?” and shout it out together.

Again, as it was a review they already new it. Then I usually say to the kids “Is this fun?” to which they usually say “Not really” as we haven’t got into the game, but today they were all saying that just asking me questions was fun in itself. Now that’s the sort of class I like! Eventually I did introduce the “gorilla” card ( or actually it was a shark as that’s all I had with me).

3. When the shark appears the kids all rush to the opposite side of the class.
4. The teacher runs through the kids to touch the wall at the side where they were previously standing.
5. If any of the kids take longer than the teacher to touch their wall, they are out. ( But you rarely need to enforce this rule as the kids usually just enjoy the running part without needed extra motivation)

This gets them very genki, and really enthused about going through the picture cards to make more questions.

This all took 15 minutes which gave us a nice 30 minutes for the main “What’s your favourite…?” lesson. So first of all it was to point out that they can say “….. suki desu ka?” in English, but how do you say “suki na …. ha nan desu?”. This is the question kids ask the most, but some classes don’t always get the distinction. But no problems today, these are very bright kids and it was easy to introduce “What’s your favourite food?”. As usual the word “favourite” causes a few problems the first few times as it’s brand new, but if it didn’t there’d be no point doing this lesson – the whole idea is to teach the kids things they don’t know, not just ones they do!

Then once I’d introduced the sentence and they had roughly got it I introduced another couple of words such as “movie” and “sport” and asked them, in a puzzled looking way, “Well, then how do you say “suki na eiga ha nan desu ka?” to which they had a minute of funny looking expressions ( where it is important to leave them time to think) and then a few of them said “What’s your favourite movie?”.

Very good, lots of praising, then another question “Well, what about suki na supotu ha nan desu ka?” to which a little more thinking time and the answer appeared. Not all classes can do this, sometimes you’ll have kids who’ve learnt it before and just shout out the answer, or teachers who aren’t patient enough, or sometimes classes that will just tilt their heads and go “eh?”. But today these kids fully took advantage of the time to think and used it well. After we’d gone through all the topics from the song ( using the CDROM for picture cards and sounds) and asking them how to form the questions they had the English well worked out and the “favourite” word perfected. Challenges such as this are very important to get the kids thinking, breaking down the language and rebuilding it to say new things.

The Song

Next was the song, and for that you need to figure out some gestures. So I simply asked “What’s your favourite movie?” in English, to which most classes would simply “repeat after me” but these kids knew it was a question and answered it. It took a few moments, but they came up with “Hero” ( a new Japanese movie), but as we couldn’t think of a gesture it became broom flying for “Harry Potter”. Sports was baseball ( the baseball team kids shouted out first!), the cartoon was one I hadn’t heard of, which had another baseball gesture. Video game was initially playing a Playstation to which I suggested doing a wii instead as you move more ( they liked this). Pet was a lion ( I showed them my picture of my “pet” lion – always a favourite). Food was just eating. Comic book they went for the shuriken throwing action of Naruto, and for TV Show they simply mimed my pose from the picture card ( the advantage of having your own TV Show I guess!).

Then we went through the CDROM mini lesson ( i.e. the acappella version of the song), then straight into the music. They were great!

Some teachers complain that there is no “repeat after me” in this song and the kids have to quickly figure out what’s next, but that’s the whole point, to get them thinking. With just one run through the mini lesson they did the song no problem, loved the music and got hyped up with their own original gestures. The only thing I did change was to edit the chorus to be “I like…” instead of “… is my favourite”. I’ll have the edited version for you in the CD Owners Club next week.

Anyway, usually I only spend around 10 minutes or so going through the new words and teaching the song, but these kids were really into it, full on concentration and loving all the problems I threw at them. As it was so much fun I spent more time on it and had only 5 minutes left for the game. I had planned on doing the “What’s your favourite…?” Game, and had I had the picture cards I should have re-done the “Gorilla Game” with this new theme, but went instead for the lines quiz where all the questions were “What’s your favourite …?” questions. The fantastic thing here was that the kids who were out were coaching their team mates with “Say “I like…” etc. Very nice. There was a slight drop in the kids’ spirits when one team lost, but a quick rendition of “Losing just means “Try again”” and they became well genki again.

So overall an absolutely fantastic lesson. A nice review, new target English and lots of thinking on the part of the kids.

The school also took some video so if it turns out OK I’ll hope to have it in the CD Owners Club soon.

The Show

In the afternoon I had a basic show ( rock, paper, scissors, Come on!, What’s your name?“) for the whole school which was, as expected, really good. Having two projectors really made it feel like a big event and the best thing was seeing the Special Needs students who had the biggest smiles and most exciting faces you could possibly imagine.

But I was very happy with the “What’s your favourite…?” song. Although I probably went overboard on the Good Morning warm up ( you wouldn’t want to do that everyday!), the kids just loved the favourite theme. They were really wanting to say the English and tell me what things they liked. The song they did great at and even without a game they loved the lesson.

A bit down?

After the Ministry’s announcement the other week that English won’t start until at least 2011, many of the teachers I’ve been in touch with have been down and a little disheartened, and I guess I was a little myself. But seeing today’s school really lifted my spirits. Yes they are a smallish school in the middle of nowhere, yes they do have one of the best head teachers in the country and hence some of the best classroom teachers, but they are a model of how good and how much fun Elementary School English and especially Genki English can be. If you’re in a school like this yourself, enjoy it and let everyone know just how good your students are!