I spent my day off this week looking round the Louvre. Being mid week it was quite busy with school trips, especially around the Mona Lisa and the other more famous paintings, and some of the poor teachers were certainly struggling to keep all their kids in line.

If you are planning a school trip, one really useful idea is to think of as many “command type” phrases that you’ll need and simply add them in to the warm up game in previous lessons. Things like “make 2 lines”, “hold up your tickets”, “hold up your lunch box”, “move to the left”, “move to the right” can be very useful.

We once took a school trip to the local Coca Cola factory. On the way back the kids were hogging pretty much the whole railway platform when a group of old ladies were trying to get past. The class teachers were having a hard time in Japanese trying to get the kids to move around and make room. After a while I simply shouted out “Good Morning” to the kids, who had been conditioned to pay attention when I say that, then “boys, stand up and move to the left, girls stand up and move to the right, 3, 2, 1 Go!”. And they all moved almost all at the same time, perfectly on queue. The old ladies got through OK and all the while were saying things like “wow, those are nice children and they speak such good English”. Hearing a comment like that from a total stranger is an amazing motivator for a 9 year old!