Akita, Japan

Some people have been wondering why I put “snails” as the first animal in the new “I like animals” song. Surely something more exciting would be better first? Well, if you saw the kids’ almost cinematic reaction to it this morning you’d have seen exactly why snails are the best!

What you do is ..

1.) Teach the “Do you like animals?” song first (or even in a previous lesson), which is usually quite easy.
2.) Ask the kids to guess what your favourite animal is.
3.) After lots and lots of guesses you final say “snails!”.
4.) To which the kids all recoil in shock that you could possible like such an animal and let out the most enormous “eeehhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!” sound! That’s the kind of reaction we like to get!
5.) Then you get them to ask back “snaaaaiiiilllllssss???” in the same expression.
6.) Then it’s dead easy to run through the song, and with this song even if the kids haven’t learnt all the animals before, they can pretty much manage all of it.

Coupling this with the Do you like animals? game (written up here in the food version), where the parents were runners and nearly ended up killing each other as they were so competitive, and a (digital) version of the Dinosaur Danger game and we had a pretty much perfect 3-in-1 lesson, after the Genki Disco Warm Up and Rock, Paper, Scissors had got them into the Genki English style. Good job the TV and newspaper people turned up!

Then a quick break before the teachers’ workshop in the afternoon. When I’ve been here before it’s been mostly private teachers or adults who were interesting in English who attended. But today was all elementary school teachers so I did the full on elementary school workshop and everyone was very impressed and were totally motivated at the end. Three of them cried with the Do Flowers Fly? video.

So a really easy, and fun, day (well, compared with last time I came here when I did demo classes for 2,000 kids!), and a very nice party in the evening before catching the plane up to Hokkaido tomorrow morning.

Just remember to put the snails first!