Magic show for the MACS English school

A week ago, I did a magic show for the children at the MACS English conversation school. I have been there many times before, and the kids are always very enthusiastic and seem to enjoy magic a lot. I did 30 minutes or so of magic, and then we had 30 minutes or so where I taught them two simple magic tricks that they can do themselves.

Since I have been there many times before, I was running low on new material. I was told that there would mainly be kids that had not seen me before, so I packed a bag full of things that usually go over well with kids, like sponges and picture cards. This year, I also finished with a signed card into a sealed PET-bottle, which especially the teachers thought was extremely mystifying.

My own favorite new thing was a quiz show style part, where we had a team of all the children and a team with all the teachers and they had to draw questions from a bag and if anyone in the team knew the answer the team got one point. The teachers kept drawing very difficult questions that they could not answer, while the kids got fairly easy questions regarding English, and since it was an English school they were supposed to know the answers. As to what was magic about this game, I made a magic prediction of what the final score was. This is a part of a trick from Tom Stone's book Maelstrom that I made to fit the English teaching environment. I find that children get tired after watching 10 to 15 minutes of magic, so when as in this case I am asked to do longer shows for kids, I try to find something that is not so tiring for the brain but that is still fun enough to keep everyone interested, to get 5 to 10 minutes of relaxation in the middle. I have also used a version of the "everyone gets bingo at the same time"-trick, where I usually make all the kids get bingo at the same time, and none of the teachers get bingo at all (though they get lots of numbers that fall on their bingo cards too).

Anyway, I had fun, the kids seemed to have lots of fun, and the teachers had fun, so it was a success I think.