As it’s back to term time now teachers only have time for workshops after classes have finished. Which is good as that means I can do some stuff with the kids beforehand to show the teachers just how well the songs and ideas work in practice. I usually do this by getting all the kids in the gym and squashing down four hours worth of lessons into a one hour lesson, ( or “show” as I call it as it sounds better for the press!). Today’s kids were great, and were probably the most well behaved kids I’ve ever seen, well motivated, noisy when I wanted them to be and quiet in the talky bits. The parents were also good. Great.

After lunch with the kids ( I really need to get the “What do you think of….?” theme up on the site!) I had a long meeting with the teachers in charge and was very impressed with their curriculum. Most schools have the most weird ideas of what to teach, but everything here was great. It wasn’t till later I realised a lot of the material was GE based. They also had some cool ideas of their own, for example using a laundry theme for clothes. This school has just started English lessons this month so the seminar was very much a kickstarter, giving the teachers specific help on the topics they have to teach before Christmas. So I cut out most of the general type stuff, just did a bit of motivation talking and then activities. First request was “Doctor, Doctor” with the Doctor, Doctor game for the younger grades and a modified Harry Potter game for the older grades ( i.e. the Voldemorts say “You’re …. hurts” and the kids have to act like their arm or whatever hurts. The free Harry Potters come along and say “Are you OK?” and the answer is “My … hurts”, then they are free. It worked great!). Then a quick look through the animals theme, they loved the fact that CD4 has not only the animal names but also the sounds the animals make. I agree that this isn’t the most useful English in the universe, but the younger kids love it and it really gets them excited. Then a quick go through the colour song ( the kids point to the colour whilst singing), and a few extra bits like katakana etc. etc. I ran way over time, but they seemed very happy with the result!

Afterwards the teachers were also asking about Classroom English. This is something I’ve been looking at for a while now. They have lots of lists of words and phrases, but the other teachers just ignore them as they don’t know how to pronounce them. So a CD would be really useful, they said! So figuring it would be a solid goal for me I said I’d make one for them! Hopefully if they like it I’ll be able to make it into a proper CD for other teachers to use as well.

Then I came home a fell straight asleep!!