Teach English: First Lesson Warm Up + Rock, Paper, Scissors

English version is here:
http://genkienglish.net/onlineworkshopvideo.htm

Hello,

Here's the first 10 minutes of my standard demo class. Hopefully you'll get some ideas and see how good even beginner students can be with a little motivation and music thrown in there.

It's of a small school where I taught all the grades together. They have had a few lessons before, but the Rock, Paper, Scissors song ( http://genkienglish.net/rockpaper.htm ) was their first time.

It starts off part way through my warm up,
Then Genki English Rule 1: Think you can and you can!
Then intro of Rock, Paper, Scissors i.e. each word twice and then once through the mini-lesson. As you can see the kids pretty much got it just from this.
Then Genki English Rule 2: Losing just means "try again!"
Then another couple of goes through the song very fast.
Then the song itself.

Altogether it's 10 minutes. You'll see how much Japanese I use and how much emphasis is put on motivation talk. These were really good kids, but their speed was about the same as most good classes.

The song is from Genki English CD vol.4:
http://www.genkienglish.net/cd4.htm

Enjoy!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• teach
• english
• esl
• efl
• mfl
• pmfl
• motivation
• 小学校
• 英語
• 英会話
• じゃんけん

[tjcomer]

Did you film this in Japan?

[GenkiJapanNet]

@tjcomer This one is in Japan, yes.

[limersbey]

Your whole program and style of teaching is really amazing and clearly very effective.

I've been using your lesson plans but I find it much more difficult to communicate things and get the children fired up because I don't speak their native language, nor do I have a co-teacher in the room, and the room is also very small.

What advice would you give to help me adapt to these contraints?

[GenkiJapanNet]

@limersbey I've done this in countries where I didn't speak the kids' language (e.g. China, Thailand & Sweden) and it works out good, it just takes longer!

It is worthwhile learning the language, especially when we move up into more complicated lessons.

One easy way is to practice the lesson on your own the night before. Think through what you'd like to say, write those phrases down and learn them in the kids language. Just a few key phrases can make all the difference!

[wakalakawhee]

Wow, this is a really good way to teach smaller children a foreign language! I wish my teachers did this when I was younger!

Hopefully, if I get a job as an English teacher in a foreign country, I could use this strategy. It actually looks pretty fun!

By the way, I am a sophomore in high school, taking German and Japanese along with English, so you could say I have a strong interest in this field. Any advice, if you have any?

[aaaaaaaaooooooo]

I'm AMAZED at the children's pronounciation!!!

[sandugosathailand]

THis is cool, Activity centered, TPA total physical approach... great Job!

[GenkiJapanNet]

It's all life skills so just removing competition doesn't teach them how to handle things in the future.

I always get them to think "try again" - even if we don' t do it right then it gets them wanting to do English in the next lesson.

[dialp4penguin]

So if we're playing karuta or something, and one kid gets 11 cards and the other gets 1, what do I tell the 'loser' in that situation? Or do you not refer to it as competition at all? Is it best to avoid games like that where there is a distinct winner and a loser?

Also when I say "tell" I mean literally, in Japanese, what kind of things are good to say? If I say mou ikai I feel as if that implies that we're going to play the game again, when that is often not the case.

Thanks!

[GenkiJapanNet]

It's that if they lose a game they should not feel bad about it but should simply try again. This thinking then gets transferred to normal English speaking, where if they make a mistake they just try again.

Most kids already know this from playing computer games.

Unfortunately many bad teachers drill it out of them by instilling a fear of making mistakes and failure, which is a huge problem in later life!

[dialp4penguin]

I think your presentation is great, but I don't understand the concept, "losing means 'try again' or 'one more time.'"

Does it mean, "if you lose next time try harder," or does it literally mean, "if you lose, keep playing a game until you win." Or is there something more obvious I'm missing?

I fully subscribe to the "if you think you can do it, you can do it" way of thinking, but in a competitive game in an elementary school setting, I'm still not sure what to tell the loser.

[GenkiJapanNet]

You don't even need it for that, the vocab you can get with special songs and the grammar is just practice!