One of the great things about Genki English is all the amazing ideas people send in to share with everyone. Sometimes they take a bit of work to make public ( especially things with copyrights of images etc.), but they are always really good ideas.

Today I finally managed to get Atley Jonas’ Days of the Week cards all jazzed up for the site. I’ve always found using the planets to be a good way to make this otherwise pretty mundane topic more interesting. Kids always love seeing real photos of the planets. Atley also came up with the idea of using the astronomical symbols for the planets, and along with some very nice NASA images they make the cards look very cool to say the least! Atley also sent in his “Borg” & “Week long war” games.

Elsewhere long time contributor Katie Dwyer has sent in her “Leg it!” and “Funky Footwork” games. Which are also very nice.

The Phonics ABC song has been a bit hit in the Japanese blogosphere, and today I finally managed to upload a high quality mp3 version you can use in class. Most of the feedback from Japanese teachers has been “It’s too fast! The normal abc song is OK at this speed, but not phonics!”. The main reason for that is, of course, that the teachers are used to Ay, Bee, Shes and phonics is something new, whereas for the kids they don’t care and just do the phonics from the start. The idea I had for the song was to keep it fast to use as a review and unlike the other phonics songs I wasn’t thinking it to be used first thing in the very first phonics lesson.

The kids do get lost on the first verse, but as per Genki English rule number 2, they try again. Then in the middle section it’s a really simple “repeat after me”, then thanks to this part just about every kid can sing the final verse, even though it’s just as fast as the first verse! The problem for Japanese adults is the katakana starts to interfere with the rhythm. So I’ve bowed to pressure somewhat and also recorded a “very, very slow version”. I really hate to do that as the fast version is so much more beneficial for the kids. But if teachers don’t like it they won’t use it, so I suppose it’s the lesser of two evils.

I’ve also got an online numbers game ( to go in the new online games section ), the Japanese version of the Da Vinci Code Game ( i.e. you can print out both versions to help with discussing the lesson with the JTE ) and Japanese version of the GenkiGerman sites finished. Anyway, I’ve got lots more readers’ ideas waiting to go on the site (A5 picture cards, more crosswords, picture dominoes etc.), please keep sending more in and as soon as I get back from Tokyo this week I’ll get cracking!