Hey, it's Adam from Safie.
monolithic-adam.hatenablog.com
Since I joined in March I have been wanting to start doing an English event to get to know my new coworkers better. I was finally able to do it in June so I wanted to write about it!
Safie English School
So because I used to be an Elementary School/English Conversation School teacher 10+ years ago I named it Safie English School. I just wanted it to be a place where me and others at Safie could use/practice/learn English in a casual setting.
With other members from the Mobile Team, we limited it to members from the Tech department to see how it would do. Our Agenda went something like this:
- Introduction/Icebreakers
- English Games
- Free Talk
The response from everyone at Safie was amazing! We had 15+ participants join and even some walk-ins!
Introduction & Icebreaker
First me and Jerome(a French iOS/Android Engineer here at Safie) introduced ourselves and then went straight to the icebreaker.
Our Icebreaker was 2 Truths and 1 Lie, a personal favorite. The rules are write down 2 real things about yourself and 1 fake thing. The best/most fun are the ones that sound crazy but are actually true.
My example was:
- I was friends with a princess in College
- I played American Football in High School <-- This is a lie!
- I have met Ayase Haruka
Because we had 15+ people we split everyone into groups/teams and we had a lot of fun with it. I think the winner was when 1 participant played it perfectly and listed 3 injuries, making it impossible to guess 🤣
English Games
We wanted to give beginners and other members not confident in their English skills a little more warm up so we prepared 2 games to play as a group. Pictionary and Word Train(Shiritori). Also classics from my Teacher days.
We started easy and did some Food/Animals with Pictionary and then some harder ones like The Cloud ™ or our product Safie One. Everyone got them surprisingly quick!
And for Word Train we started easy too with Animals and then to Programming words only and the programming one was way easier because everyone is in Tech.
Free Talk
Now that everyone was warmed up I wanted to open it up for some English conversation. We had a bit of time but 1 unfortunate thing cut our time a bit short. We had planned an hour or 2 of free talk but because of building maintenance we had to leave the building before 9. Next time we will leave more time to talk.
On Reflection
Overall good satisfaction was good but we didn't get to do much free talk so there wasn't much time to really practice English I think.
It was due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict so hopefully next time we can all practice more!
Some really positive feedback too!
- It was more fun than expected. Thank you so much for organizing such a great event!
- I'd like to be a staff next time if needed
- Thank you for the great event! I had much fun. It was unexpected that we could only stay until 9 PM because of the building's power outage. Next time, we should try to have more time for free talk.
What's Next
We are going to open it up to the whole company next time and hold it again this month. Also definitely making sure there is no building maintenance so we have more time.😅
Thanks to everyone who joined.
If this sounds interesting to anyone we are hiring! 😉😉😉
