JESIE teachers visited Xin'an Primary School on March 9 to hold our first Open Day activity in Wuxi of this semester. The theme of March is "Around the world", aiming at giving students a fun and exotic sense of world cultures.

On this early spring afternoon, Marie brought students a lesson about animals in the world of ice and snow. Students learned names of these animals; wolf, polar bear, moose, squirrel, beaver, and lynx. Marie chose target game, bull's eye game, Pictionary games and match the names game to reinforce students learning outcome. Students were divided into Boys' Team and Girls' Team to race against each other. At last, Marie reviewed with students all the sentences they learned during the lesson.

Class 1 Grade 3 had a great time learning western food with teacher Ethan at the same time. The words "salad, hamburger, hot dog, steak, pizza, and pie" were matched with pictures to facilitate students’ learning. He also brought a laser pointer and asked kids to point the right picture of the word. After introducing the sentence "I want to eat -------", two teams of students competed with each other to finish full sentences correctly.

The following Thursday March 16, Fangqian Primary School welcomed teacher Julie to give a lesson on Music. Students became relaxed and cheerful in facing Julie's enthusiasm for Music. Acted as a conductor, Julie played excerpts of different music genres from various parts of the world, and let students get familiar with genres such as rock, reggae, and jazz. After that, to ensure students understanding of different music, students were asked to compete in teams to match the music they heard to their genre on the board. Thanks to Julie, students fully enjoyed a educational and entertaining class with the combination of English and music.

On that same afternoon, a small team of JESIE teachers visited Wuxi's Xincheng Middle School to give two lucky classes a different kind of educational experience. Thomas Crook kicked off the first lesson with a 'correctly place the flag on the map' warm up activity, which had students eager to show their geography knowledge. What followed was a task of creating "passports". Students were then taught a new sentence structure: 'I visited< famous attraction> in,' which they put to use in a dice activity. The lesson concluded with a competitive 'match the pairs' memory game, which had Team UK and Team China battling it out for glory.

In the second class, senior teacher Tom Butler focused everyone's minds on the USA with his 'name something from America' warm up game. He then introduced the students to eight famous US cities spread across the country. Next, Tom got students on their feet to teach them the eight main compass directions. Now that the groundwork as laid, students were ready to learn the sentence structure 'is in theof America'. They practiced this sentence in a pair dialogue, before diving into a fun tic-tac-toe game that reinforced the taught structure. Tom wrapped up the lesson with a quick review to ensure the students not only had a great lesson but would also retain the information they learnt on this fun Thursday.

Wanzhuang Primary School was our host this week for the JESIE Open Day on March 23. As usual, the students were peering out the windows to see who would be their teacher for the lesson. With the monthly theme, "Around the World", Warwick's class kicked off with a PowerPoint presentation with jets zooming all over the world. The students were taught the applicable vocabulary, such as "hamburgers" and "America". The sentence patterns that followed were "In …. I can …". The game was a battle between the rows in the class. Given a pair of chopsticks, the students had to race against the clock and place the magnetic words in the correct order on the board.

Next door, teams were cheering as Adam led them in their visit to England. Students learnt about Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, the British Museum and St. Paul's Cathedral. Adams' toy guns took the show as the young marksmen tried to hit the high-scoring vocabulary words. This was finished off with an intense game of PowerPoint bombing where the students left holding the toy had to stand up and deliver the correct sentence.

On March 30, the students from Nanfeng Primary School in Wuxi got a little taste of England this week with Domi. Our theme this month being around the world, Domi showed the students the landmarks of London such as the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and of course, the Queen's house: Buckingham Palace. After learning the landmarks, the students were split in two teams competing against each other to identify those landmarks on the board. Then, each team was then tasked to solve puzzles representing the landmarks and name what they saw. Finally, each team had to unscramble words and make a sentence, each of them holding one word and standing in line to write "I can see Buckingham Palace" or "I can see the London Eye."

Our second teacher, Dany, really took the students around the world with his sports-oriented lesson. The students had the chance to see great athletes in action doing all kinds of crazy tricks, skateboarding, cliff diving, bungee jumping, surfing and more with truly amazing videos. What they didn't know was that they would have to try to do the same with a mime game, which gave the whole classroom a very interesting show. Have you ever tried to mime bungee jumping? It can hurt! The highlight of the lesson was surely the bow and arrow game were the students had to hit the picture of their chosen sport on the board after saying "I want to go [cliff diving]."