I will tell you about the last lesson of Happy English I taught a year ago to a group of students aged from 9 to 11. The subject was ‘Sport’ and I was tempted to load up an Australian Rules Football game and just let them sit and enjoy but eventually thought better of it and prepared a lesson a little more oriented (pun?) towards what they would understand.

Sport and the playing of physical games take a back seat with kids in China and the lack of parks, playgrounds and gardens in these cities certainly would contribute to that. The school grounds in this country remind me of a couple of schools I went to as a kid. The play areas of the educational places I attended were concrete and bitumen and playing games during breaks at these schools meant a lot of grazed knees and hands. Handball, basketball and table tennis were the main morning and lunch break indulgences, or a quick puff on a cigarette behind the school perimeter wall!The kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools and high schools here in China remind me of those days. The emphasis here is on scholastic achievement not sporting prowess.

Anyway, I went through the first hour of the lesson and then it was game time. I did introduce the lesson by asking the kids whether they knew what great sporting event was soon to unfold – the biggest event of its type in the world and it’s held every 4 years. I then drew the Olympic rings on the board to give them a hint. 5 out of the 7 had no clue while the other two gleefully pointed out to me that I had drawn the rings wrong way up with 2 on top and 3 below when we all know, don’t we? that it’s 3 rings on top of two rings. (Little smartarses!) Considering their ages would have been 5 to 7 years old when the Games were on in Beijing maybe I expected a bit too much.

On with the lesson. Balloons are a great source of amusement in the classrooms and the first game I called “Caterpillar” which involved the kids having to line up behind each other, squeeze a balloon between their bodies and walk around the classroom, maintaining the line and not losing any balloons in the process. Great fun. The next game was “Humpback” in which I get the kids to stand back to back and insert a balloon between them. They then have to race from one end of the room to the other, hands on head, not lose the balloon and not curse their partner. More fun, although Amy, one girl in the class, just turned 11 and she is 5’ 8” and had to be matched with a partner almost 2 foot smaller. Where to put the balloon?

For the next game I made two teams and the idea was for each team to keep 5 balloons in the air at all times. Total lack of co-ordination and physical concentration resulted in the winning time being 11 seconds. Sigh!!

A little preparation for the next contest – I half filled 6 plastic water bottles and set them up like 10 pin bowling and the kids had to roll a volleyball at the bottles. 5 throws and highest total wins. The students wanted me to join in but when my first roll score was better than their total 5 rolls they thought it better that I be referee and bottle stander–upper!  Chinese kids are super competitive and you have to adjudicate arguments, accusations and cheating. It’s a referee’s nightmare particularly when you can’t yell at them in their own language!

For the penultimate game I slowed it down a bit and this competition involved bouncing ping pong balls into a waste paper basket. They were allocated 60 seconds each and we had a box full of balls and away they went. As uncoordinated as she was, probably because of her growth spurt, this is where Amy’s sheer height – and reach - came into its own. She was almost dropping the balls in the basket without bouncing and I can tell you, that as a result of her uncanny accuracy, the boys lost interest in this game rather quickly. Amy was unbeatable – Olympic champ!

The final game was water pistol fights and water filled balloons at 20 paces in th eoutide yard and I had asked my assistant the day before to go into a local toy store and buy 2 or 3 water pistols. Remember the water pistols we had as kids? They looked a bit like small handguns with the hole in the top and the little plastic cap that popped out where you filled it with water and the trigger mechanism that primed the gun. The assistant had purchased pistols slightly bigger than those I remember from my childhood and they looked like Star Wars’ stun guns but I thought they were okay. Cheap too at 5RMB each. My kids unsheathed mini water canons that looked like something the Terminator used to cause murder and mayhem in those movies! I was seriously outgunned.

Not only that, they had all brought rain coats! I thought:  what wusses. The temperature was about 28C, pretty warm and humid, the sun was shining so who was going to worry about getting a bit wet?! I don’t know how many of the readers have played water pistol games with this new weaponry but let me tell you, after the boys ganged up on me I was wetter than if I had swum the English Channel! I thought then that the idea of raincoats was inspirational and I reminded my assistant, as I squirted her mercilessly at short range, that in future not to try to save money but think more about the honour of the foreign English teacher and buy a bloody water cannon next time! So endeth the lesson!