Most of my energies over the last few years have been spread all over the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. But one place where I haven’t done much, outside of bookstore events, is in the capital Tokyo. So this week has been nice to have not one, but two workshops in real elementary schools.

As today’s workshop would be attended by a class of university teacher training students, the very nice lady in charge also asked me to do a kids demo class. Fair enough, except they chose 5th graders! I do have lots of stuff for 5th graders, but nothing that could be considered a “demo class”. I usually just do motivation stuff and using things like photos from my travels. I was also warned that some of the kids could be a little out of hand, but that most of them are very quiet and hard working. Actually I would have put the worrisome kids as being the quiet ones, noisy kids are never a problem!

In the event I needed have worried at all, they were as a model class as you could imagine and were so interactive, asking questions and making lots of very intelligent comments. The content was a straight by the book demo GE lesson, Rock, Paper, Scissors and Do you have any pets? plus lots of motivation stuff and self intro things and it worked great, with them bouncing out of the class demanding the teacher do the Gokiburi game with them next English lesson.

Then it was the teachers’ workshop, and one of the best ones I’ve ever had. As it’s term time we didn’t have much time and the teachers had lots and lots of questions. Usually when it’s all question time the teachers start getting all fidgety ( just like 5 year olds!), but here even without any activities or games they were totally into the whole philosophy of things. They were asking a lot of big questions and I was like “Do you want the light answer to that, or the deep one?”. To which they wanted the deep answers and it was great getting into proper teaching fundamentals as well as the more practical stuff.

The board of education were also very impressed and have invited me back. It would have been great to chat longer, but I had to catch my flight, and I had never seen so many people at Kawasaki station when I changed trains!

Right, tomorrow it’s off into Asia!