Diary of a Creative English Trainer: Day Five
A brand new hub opens in Newham!
Day Five
This Tuesday saw the opening session of the first Creative English Hub in Newham, with our very first eight learners. They were all very tentative and nervous, but seemed to enjoy the poster-making activity (which tells us about themselves). They were less excited by the balloon game, and it struck us that maybe many learners are not really used to playing games.
Creative English trainers better than Tesco – new evidence just in!
When we reached the part where I introduced the Street, I opened up a discussion on what we might call it. There were options on ‘Green Street’, ‘Tesco Street’ and ‘Brick Lane’, but no one voted for any of them! Then someone had the bright idea of calling it after the teacher and most hands went up, so we now have Sue Street! Nice to know that, in some things at least, I am more popular than Tesco!
The venue is huge and gives us lots of scope for working through the various scenarios with the characters from the Sue Street Soap. And the staff at the centre are wonderful!
Meanwhile, back in Ilford…
Our Thursday session in Ilford re-opened after the Easter holidays with whoops of delight, as we are now in the big room! Today we completed Session Three, with the party for Max’s 80th birthday. (there was too much material in our previous session, which is only 1 ½ hrs)
Rather than come into this cold, I added in a short improvisation for Samantha, who had bought a dress that was too big. It needed to be returned, and she was a bit nervous, so Sally went to the shop with her. Our ‘cashier’ contributed the phrase, “The changing rooms are over there”, which proved to be something that caught the attention of the whole class. At the end, I took the opportunity of developing this a little, emphasising the phrase ‘over there’ and found that I could link it easily to the ‘positioning’ we had done 10 minutes previously – far from. Then, I added in the opposite – ‘over here’ – which linked readily to the work already done on ‘near to’.
The party scene went well, with class deciding that Arthur had stolen a ring. Fortunately, Max decided that he could forgive him!
At the end, I finished with everyone in a circle and, standing in the middle with a bean bag, I threw it to each person, asking, ‘What was good today?’
In fact, it was all good!
