The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so the teachers wanted to see how GE really works with real kids. We had about 60 from every age from 6 weeks to 6th grade! (We set the minimum limit as 1st grade, but of course parents always lie to try and get their little darlings in!)

For over 100 kids I’d always only recommend doing just the songs, the games take too much controlling unless you have fully trained staff. But 60+ was just about manageable. So after doing the Disco Warm Up and Rock, Paper, Scissors (the biggest GE song in Japan!) to get the Genki English rules learnt:

1: Dekiru to omoeba dekiru – I can do it!
2: Makeru no imi wa mou ikkai – Losing means “try again”!

… I did the Superhero song as a full real lesson, because after all these kids hadn’t done any of the English in it before.

What do you think?

First of all I tell the kids about my friend Genki English Man, who is a secret super hero. The kids love this!

Then I ask them what super powers they think he has. This is always a great idea for any theme, rather than you running through the materials from the song, you ask the kids what pets or colours or animals orfoods that they like. Then if they hit upon something from the song you teach it, otherwise you have a great list of vocab to teach in the next lesson.

Yes, this does mean you need to speak the kids’ language – but a great language teacher should always be able to teach themselves their students’ language ; ) (Or you could try Genki Korean, Spanish, Genki Thai, Genki Japanese, Genki German etc.)

Asking the kids what vocab will come up really builds up rapport with the kids, and just like getting them to think of their own gestures, it gives them an investment in the song as it usually contains the words they came up with (because asking kids what they want to say is how I wrote them originally.) They also come up with some other cool things, one girl today said that she thought that if a ghost appeared he could chase it away – wow, 25 years later and the Ghostbusters are still popular!

All in the details…

As usual with the Genki English pictures it’s the details that grab the kids’ attention. Just like the single fish in the swimming pool in Where are you going?, today it was the Superhero falling in the “jump” animation, the never ending climb and the sack full of carrots in “cook” that got their attention, got them laughing and hence the class was super easy to control. Some teachers think the GE pictures are a bit weird, but as we say, GE isn’t tested on animals, it’s tested on kids!

Dinosaurs…

Once we’d done the song, getting them really loud and with great body posture, I decided to do the Dinosaur Danger game with the Superhero vocab i.e. you hold up a card and they say “I can …” but if it’s the dinosaur they run!

The best bit here was that they didn’t know all the vocab yet. Things like “I can jump”, “I can fly”, “I can cook” etc. are dead easy, but things like “swim” or “hide” take more time. But that is the point of the games, so that they can practice and learn the words they don’t yet know properly. If they knew all the English perfectly there would be zero point in doing the game!

We actually finished with 5 minutes left so I quickly ran through the Thank You song and just as last year, they were amazing!

So then a great lunch and out to meet a TV star…..

Japanese TV star Heart Kun, named after the natural markings on his back!

Then being seen off by 5 very beautiful ladies before my flight back to Tokyo, where I’ll be over the coming week…

They also had some of the Genki English Flashcards on display today, there are far too many of them!

Teacher’s Set – Download Pack – J Superpack