Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome back to the exciting world of JESIE Open Days! We are back for the 2016-2017 school year and starting off with a very exciting first Open Day.

This weeks Open Day featured three teachers, our very own Val and Amber, as well as first timer John, at two schools: Lhasa Road Primary School and Gulou Experimental Primary School. All three teachers blew us out of the water with their enthusiasm and creativity.

First up was Teacher John at Lhasa Road. This is the school John works at full time, and you could tell as the fourth grade students crowded into the special observer equipped classroom before class even started. John has a rapport with the kids, walking around the class and joking with them. His class was focused on teaching the structure I can ___ , but I cant ___ . The class was one big game, culminating in the students playing a game of charades, acting out activities that they could and couldnt do.

Val had his own awesome take on this lesson. He too had a class of fourth graders, and chose to teach his students the sentence I can ___ like a ___ . His lesson featured animals like sharks, rabbits, dogs, mice, and lions. The students were encouraged to draw comparisons between actions that both they and these animals could do. They played several games, including a target game, and a race, to gain points for their team. The class ended perfectly in a tie.

Then it was time for a speedy but delicious lunch at Lhasa Road before we all left to get to Gulou Experimental Primary School. Here, all of the teachers had to shift gears to teaching and observing first grade. We were greeted by the lovely Lindsay, who offered us oranges and showed us an empty classroom where the soon to be presenters to take a look at the space and try out the fancy smartboard.

Val was the first presenter, engaging the students right off the bat with his color games. He even managed to get the whole class engaged in shoots and ladders, which he had set up, in an resourceful twist, on the black board. By the end of the class all of the kids could name all six colors, even Rambo, the youngster who rolled the winning number. Then it was time for the observers to split up, half to watch Ambers lesson, and the other half to watch Johns.

John had decided to teach numbers to the room of boisterous first graders. He reworked several inventive games, including an action game that had all of the students engaged and moving, in which he had the students do an action for each number. He also had a thrilling race game where students could practice counting by collecting the correct number of pencils to bring to him.

Ambers lesson was a fun discussion of farm animals. She started the class by introducing herself, and where she is from. But before long, she had the students singing and dancing to If youre happy and you know it. Amber too had a fun race game for her students to play, as well as a memory game (also used by Val in his first grade class) in which she showed the students pictures of all of farm animals, then sneakily removed one of the pictures. She finally employed the strategy of using one student to stand in for each word of the sentence This is a _____. She rounded out her class with a very fun target game.

For the teachers observing this was a fabulous show of creativity and ingenuity. All of the teachers demonstrated impressive abilities, and had a great presence with the kids. As for the students, I am sure they will be talking about these fascinating classes they had with new and interesting teachers for a while!