Now that’s a long title! I got a call the other week asking me to attend the event tonight, to meet a lot of people and to offer my support to the competition. As this is just the sort of thing I’m wanting to help promote in schools it sounded like a nice evening. And it was!

The High School kids who won the video competition were good, with some cool ideas, it really is a motivating project. This project was a special one for this year only, and the winners got sent to the UK, Ireland and Germany for a week!

The second part was the Team Teaching Lesson Plan competition, where the ALT who won got a free Upper Class Virgin Airways ticket to London for herself and her JTE! Now that’s pretty cool as well ( as a mate of mine always says, it’s not the champagne that makes 1st class flights cool, it’s the people. Just think of who you’d meet flying first class from Tokyo to London!!).

One of the winner’s was an elementary school ALT who did a great lesson about not littering ( they all had to be themed about the environment this year). Usually I spend my time looking at these types of things going “hmmm” but this was really, really well done, very professional. After a quick warm up of practising numbers the ALT did a skit where was on a beach, eating food and stuff and then just throwing the litter around whilst saying “garbage”. It was fun and the kids soon picked up the word. Then the Japanese teacher came along saying “Garbage! Clean up!”. And they started saying the phrase whilst picking up all the garbage. The kids were really in to this, so next was a game where the ALT threw loads of pieces of paper as “garbage” around and shouted out a number. The kids had to pick up that number of pieces of garbage and put them in the garbage can. To end they made up a garbage song. So that was pretty much a perfect lesson with just the right amount of words, a good message and, apart from “garbage” being America-centric, a very useful piece of language ( apparently the kids go now round the school saying “Garbage! Clean up!”).

Next up were the Junior and Senior High entries, and you could see the difference straight away!! I’m so glad I focus on elementary schools, in these videos it was like pulling teeth, eventhough the ALTs and JTEs had come up with some cool ideas, the kids were half asleep in the beginning! One thing the judges mentioned, and again it was really obvious, was that in the elementary school one, they managed to do it all in English ( due to a very skillfully produced lesson plan), but in the high school ones the JTEs were translating absolutely everything!! Even, “Chopsticks and you” and the JTE said “Ohashi to anata”, oh my goodness!! So if there are any JTEs reading this DON’T TRANSLATE EVERYTHING THE ALT SAYS!! The lessons themselves were actually really good, and the kids did come around eventually, but it really shows how much more can be achieved in an elementary school classroom compared with older kids.

It was also really cool to meet a lot of very interesting new people. And in the evening it was great to chat over a few beers, about why JETs are so important, and why projects like this really are the key to getting the kids to understand and want to communicate with people everywhere. And certainly after last week that has become even more important than ever.