Today was another JET day, doing a presentation sponsored by the Nara Prefectural Board of Education and the Ministry of Education. They had Kip Cates doing the morning seminar and he was great as usual, taking about World issues. It was great to hear the JETs saying “yeah, after his speech last time I really decided to change my whole teaching style”.

Then I was on in the afternoon. The room was packed and as there was also another seminar at the same time I only got the Genki JETs, which was really cool. So we started off (after I tried to speak in English and failed many times) and for a warm up did “What’s your name?” but the CD player was way too quiet for these guys and impossible to work with! And that really threw me, how to do an elementary school presentation without songs??? But I improved a bit and also did some question and answers. And these guys asked some really cool questions, great stuff. Usually JETs just moan in Q&A sessions, but today we got some great questions. They then loved the games (mingle and hammer) and I final got a new CD player for How are you?. The difference in using the songs or not really shone through, games are cool, but the songs make a world of difference. It was also good to see how even just a little bit of Japanese could make all the difference for the Japanese teachers. In English they understood very little ( I speak very fast!), but just a couple of little “dekiru, dekirus” or other motivation lines in Japanese and they got really into it.

So that went well and I finished on a mini-Genki speech and everyone seemed very happy.

Then it was out for dinner with AJET, and again JETs are the most amazing people. I had a really, really cool night. You guys rock!