It’s not that often that you get to go to work on a boat! And a pretty posh high speed one at that. Today started off with a quick hop across Hakata bay to a school I did a workshop for last year. This year they asked me back to do more games and songs and basically lots of activities to follow up on the basics we did last time. So I started off and went straight in to the next set of themes. The only thing I didn’t take into consideration were the new teachers who’d just joined the school in April! Ah. So when I started doing things all the other teachers were going “cool, no problem”, whereas the 3 or 4 new teachers were totally into their Junior High School mind set of “What? Eh? Panic!!” type of mode. Which really slowed things down so I basically had to go back and do a very high speed version of the intro workshop, which they didn’t really get for quite a while!

But eventually they got all the basics ( “think you can do it, and you can!”, “losing just means try again”, and “don’t analyse, just do!” ), so we could move on to some more themes, albeit at a slightly slower pace. I tell you, there is such a huge difference in teachers who’ve had a Genki English workshop, and the ones who haven’t!

One other thing about today’s school was that although they have some very genki teachers and have 6 superpacks, for some quite unknown reason their curriculum had lots of stuff that they’d just copied from other schools, and they hadn’t a clue what all the games and songs were supposed to be! Hence why they wanted to see more of the Genki English stuff actually working, so they’d have the confidence to put more of them in the curriculum.

So we started off with What’s your name? as a review, then Left & Right. Then into “How old are you?” and mingle as per the usual basic workshop. I also changed the break format today so instead of 90 minutes then a 30 minute break, I did 50 mins then a 10 minute break which worked well as they were asking lots of good questions in the break time! Then Rock, Paper, Scissors so that we could do Where are you from? and use the minicards for the game ( a modified Name Card Game). And another break, then How much? with the bargaining game and then request for “ordering at a restaurant” which went nicely into the food theme with the balloon game and menu worksheet game, which are my current favourites at the moment!
So overall we did get quite a bit done, and they asked me back in December. Mind you now with CD5 it probably takes 4 full days to go through the full Genki English curriculum!!

Then it was off to another school for a “from the beginning” workshop. I tried videoing this one again, but the first set of questions were about the teachers wanting to learn themselves and how to go about it. So I deviated off the normal path and did the “Otona ga jouzu naru kotu” ( a workshop and article for adults to get good at English, something similar to the one I have on the GenkiJapan site). That’s was cool, so then into the usual questions of what to teach, what to do about pronunciation etc, which were all nicely answered by the Superpack they’d just bought ( the teaching guide videos were particularly well received!) Where are you going? was the theme I’d chosen to demonstrate the pronunciation software, and it never fails to get teachers genki even at 4PM on a long hot day! Then in the last hour, before going into the stuff about the 6th graders and my war speech, we did “When is your birthday?” along with the picture cards. It was the first time I’ve used the new cards for this theme, and it worked really well with all the descriptions. That would make a great 6th grade lesson!

So that was pretty cool and the teachers were very happy!

Then I had a bit of a rush to get ready and I’m now on the groovy new Shinkansen to Kagoshima, which actually isn’t a shinkansen till we get to Yatsuhiro! Oh well, never mind it was a good day’s work today!