OK, first things first, I’m going to be back in Okinawa twice next year! In June we’re planning a mini-tour, so if you would like a workshop at your elementary school or for your group of teachers, get in touch now and we’ll get you on the list. Next year my elementary school workshops will probably have a presentation fee, but for Okinawa they’ll still be free and as my travel expenses will be paid for to get to Naha, it’ll only be the travel expenses to get to your school and hotel accommodation that I’ll need. It’s a great chance. If you need any materials to persuade your head teachers, have a look at the workshop details in Japanese and my self intro in Japanese. As usual, go straight to the head teacher, not via the Board of Education ( that will take forever!)

Then on August 20th 2007 I’ll have another three day workshop as part of the J-Shine two week certification course. This year that course cost around 80,000 yen, but included some materials and next year will probably include some Genki English materials as well. If you’re interested, again get in touch.

I’m actually writing this blog entry after doing 6 hours of workshops and flying back up to Japan, and I think I already miss Okinawa! I don’t know if it’s the weather, the sense of space, the way people dress and are less stressed, or maybe that everyone was so nice or that I really got to help the teachers with a full set of workshops instead of a 90 minute “warm up” and stayed in a really nice hotel??? It’s also a lot less humid down in Okinawa!

Anyway today’s workshops were again great, going through how to chop up the themes and re-use the language in other ways, e.g. to combine Where are you going?, Where are you from? + How did you get here? into a massive I like pink fish game where the answers were things like “I’m going to school in Australia by mountain bike”. We also did things like using “Do you have …?” from the pets song and using it with the transport mini cards in the Do you have game? ( Of course you can also do it the other way and use “I came here by ” + animal for a fun alternative!) And after yesterday going through how the GE curriculum is made ( by actually listening to what the kids say), we pretty much worked our way through it. The students were also up teaching the new themes using the computer for the pronunciation and they did really well. There’s so much material now on GE that it pretty much covers everything, the only thing missing is one-page printable lesson plans, which I’ll get to work on as soon as I can!

The list of the activities we did is here: Okinawa 2006 ( In Japanese)

If you’d like to add to this post, have a look at the Genki English forum.