Today’s plan was a full school show, then 3 demo classes. The idea being they’d be model classes that the teachers could video and I could write up a week’s worth of fantastic lesson plans for you. Ahhhh… if only things worked like they should!

First off was the show. 300 kids in the gym going through the Genki English Rules and a few songs at break neck speed. They were excellent and really top level kids. The only thing they didn’t get was getting their volume down to zero. I let it go as they were so genki, but I think that was a mistake….

Because, next up was a 2nd year class with the Bugs theme. The school had asked if instead of just one class, I could do the whole 2nd grade together. Now I had a feeling that would mean I couldn’t do it like a normal class and it would have to be more like a show. i.e. with that many kids it’s really difficult to control all the kids in the games, get feedback from them or just generally chat or go off on tangents. They also asked if I could Team Teach it with the class teacher.

If figured this might work as most of the teachers had already taken 2 of my workshops. But today the 2nd grade teachers were new, and knew nothing of GE. Ahhhh. But anyway we tried and we decided to do “Fruit Market” as a review, figuring that if the fruit market arm-in-arm dance resulted in chaos then there’d be no way we could do the mushi battle game with the bugs. Yep, chaos. They did it, but it took sooo long! They were cool with the new fruits, but everything else was 100% katakana, ah, new teachers who didn’t know that katakana is not English!

Anyway we started on the bugs theme, using the new bugs picture book to guess each bug then the software to give them the pronunciation. One of the main things about the picture books is the questions and tangents that the kids throw up where you can put in whole new sections of English. But with so many kids it was impossible to let them have any type of input as as soon as one person spoke the other classes were moaning that they couldn’t speak, then some kids decided not to speak… oh dear. So we didn’t even manage to get through the whole song in time. Finishing part way through a song isn’t a good ending if you only have one lesson, and the main mushi battle game was out, so I tried a quick go through the “How are you? Monster” game, but they asked me “What’s that?” ( I pretended I had a bug in my hand). If it was any bug they’d repeat, do the action and move one step forward. If it was a killer cockroach they had to run back to their safe wall. That sort of worked, but it was in no way a model lesson, and wasn’t fit to be copied by anyone!

So then next it was the 3rd grades. The teacher had chosen “time”. The Mr Wolf song and game make this a 110% sure fire lesson, there is no way on Earth to mess this lesson up. Or so I thought…

In the event it was the same thing, there were just too many kids to give it the personal touch, but the teachers were wanting to see a demo lesson they could copy. It just didn’t work though, all the kids were at different speeds, a big group in the middle were perfect students, but others were on sugar highs, others were talking and others were not doing anything at all. . The problem was that as soon as one teacher made a comment to get their class in line, the other classes ignored it, and you ended up with a relay of the teachers not wanting to discipline other classes, but not everyone could speak at once. Usually in this case just playing the song for them works, it gets them all on the same page. But I had no projector in the gym so there was no visuals to focus on. Eventually I just ramped things up and went full on for a show-like teaching of the song, giving them no time to think or misbehave, just so that we could at least start the game. But they were back to being all over the place for the game, ignoring the rules and generally trying to capitalising on the lesson having several people in charge! We did eventually get to the “Dinner time” part and then the bell rang, and they were like “We want to play more” but I was like “No, sorry, you wasted too much time. That’s it! So if I come back next year, how do you think we should handle things?” to which they all bowed their heads and looked really sorry. I hate doing that, as it wasn’t their fault the classes were put together. But then again they’ve got learn to work together sometimes, and listen to what other teachers say. So I left them for a few minutes then said, “Right, does any want to become the best, super genki, everybody-working-together students in Japan and play the game again?”. To which they all smiled and we had one run through the game. You always need to at least try and end on some sort of high note!

Right, so after two miserable failures would this afternoon’s joint class be “third time lucky” or “things come in threes”?

Luckily the 5th graders had cleaning time in the music room so I could chat to them before. Even with 30 kids, if they have some identity as a group, it’s easy to build up a relationship with them, to chat and find out how they want to learn and to make the lesson really interactive, back and forth between the teacher and kids, rather than a set script the teacher simply goes through.

These kids were actually really good. Their teachers last year had gone through loads of the Genki English themes. So after a review of “Rock, paper, Scissors” we went straight into today’s theme of “Where are you going?“. And they were great! Wow, what a relief. I had also planned two games, both based on the black and white mini cards. The first one was mini island hopping. The second one was where they have a pile of cards, their partner asks “Where are you going?” you answer with the top card in your pack, you do rock, paper, scissors and the winner takes their opponents top card.

For English practise the second game is much, much better than the first. But I didn’t want to set all those kids loose without checking the chaos level with the first game! And as the other years there were too many kids to keep the lesson flowing. You’d start them off, then it would take too long to get them ready to listen to their next set of instructions. So we only got to do the first game, which was really bad as it meant they hardly had any practise of the English, basically the whole lesson was spent on controlling the kids. Ahhhh…

The Genki English lesson plans are designed for groups of up to around 30, or 40 if you push it, but beyond that the songs work, but the games just aren’t scalable.

Anyway, the teachers’ workshop went OK. Over half the teachers were on their 3rd Genki English workshop so were really into things and I pitched the workshop at their level in a chat like format. The coolest thing was I finally got to use a digital whiteboard in a school! As usual it was tucked away in a corner not being used, but they pulled it out, set it up in 5 minutes and it was amazing. It’s just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report! They were astounded, even more so by the fact of how simple it was to set up and they already had the software. We also went through some new stuff, and the online picture books work so well on a digital board. Although the teachers are getting good at teaching Genki English, their English level isn’t yet up to teaching the picture books on their own, and they really liked the narrations on the first two books. That was good feedback for me to hear, so I’ll get started on adding more narrations soon. I also showed them how to introduce new English using the CD’s computer games, and that again worked very well with the digital board. Nice.

So not an entirely wasted day, but I hope nobody looks at the videos and thinks “This is Genki English?” So I’ve volunteered to go back later in the month and do some (hopefully) model lessons, this time just one class at a time!