One big difference between workshops in Europe and Asia is that in Europe there are often more requests for “keeping the kids under control” type ideas.

Once you get the warm up right most kids keep under control for a period of at least a year, but of course you need to keep coming up with new techniques. On Saturday the teachers came up with quite a few suggestions themselves. e.g.
Giving the kids marbles or counters and taking them off them as they misbehave. ( small groups )
Getting sugar high kids to be your assistant. ( big groups )
Having a “naughty chair”. ( It seems like you can get a lot of ideas from Jo Frosts’ Supernanny.)

In Japan last year there was the idea of having a “Japanese stick”. If anyone uses Japanese when they shouldn’t they get given the Japanese stick. They can only get rid of it by passing it to someone else who speaks Japanese! Of course you can adapt this for any other country you happen to be teaching in.

As with any of these ideas it’s very much a “choosing the right tool for the job” exercise as nothing ever works 100%. And at the end of the day, rather than spending your time trying to keep up with bad behaviour, it’s nearly always much more worthwhile to invest time in finding exciting and interesting lesson ideas that will get the kids so involved they won’t have time to play up!