Now this is what it’s all about! Instead of just a one or two hour introduction, this is a full on two day set of workshops where I can spend half a day going through the basics and confidence building, then spend the rest of the time showing new techniques and actually letting the teachers try out teaching themselves. This school has several really, really good teachers who do all sorts to develop their own English teaching skills, and even their own language skills ( by learning in the car everyday!). And the lady in charge has made a huge difference to the education in Okayama. So today’s brief was to get the rest of the school up to speed, along with the next door school who feed into the same Junior High, hence they need to be on the same page.

And everything worked out very well, with lots of questions in the morning, and by the afternoon everyone was totally out of the Junior High School way of thinking about language, they were full of confidence, were totally into the idea that making mistakes is good and had a great time. A couple of the ideas tanked ( e.g. the Drinks worksheet game!), but they were really into other things like the drinks song ( apparently they used this for an official demo lesson last year with people from the Ministry in attendance, heaven knows what they thought of the song – they used the heavy metal version!), and a killer run through the When is your birthday? song to finish on a high note. Cool! I wrote up everything that we did here.

So then a quick shower and out for a very nice dinner and a couple of beers!

This school have been using GE for a while, but the one next door has an interesting system where the first year music classes are taught in a semi-English immersion scheme. Research in other places shows that immersion classes for science and maths don’t tend to produce good results, i.e. the language ability improves but the maths or science doesn’t improve as much as if it was taught in the kids’ native language. So it will be interesting to see how they get on with teaching music in English.

In the evening we were talking about what the next step is with elementary schools. For example teaching using picture cards is easier than just using actions, then using games helps even more, then using songs gets over the problem of the kids forgetting everything. So what’s the next step??? One of the teachers was asking about plays, and that’s maybe something to have a look at. It’s certainly perfectly suited to the internet, where the kids could see their scripts and click on them to hear them read aloud, to either practice at home or in the school’s computer room. The trick is finding the right plays, the right script, then the right schools to try things out in!