English Summer School

Woke up at 7:00am to rain this morning, so I quickly made contact with another ALT nearby who has a car to get a ride with her. Since today is Friday, I threw out my burnable rubbish before having a bit of breakfast, and then set off!

Arrived at the center where the English Summer School was being held at around 8:40am. The junior high school students are so tiny and cute! Some were fresh out of primary school so they were adorable. They were all very shy and seemed to be studious students. The day started off with a little opening ceremony with some speeches made by the BOE people and other important staff. We then played hot potato as an ice breaker to warm up. The experienced ALTs then did a few skits to demonstrate how to respond in English (reactions), and then we practiced those skits with the students. Their reading ability is actually really good! The student I was paired up with for this activity was only a 1st year, but she could read everything with relative ease. After that we moved into the main 1st section of the day – self-introductions. The room was arranged in two big circles of chairs, where the students would rotate after 5 minutes. That way they got to practice speaking with a lot of ALTs from different countries! Somehow the NZ ALTs all managed to be grouped together, so for the students it was literally meeting 4 Kiwis in a row!

It’s interesting that the English level between 1st years and 2nd years is already quite big. The amount of vocab known and the fluency difference was very noticeable. Apparently the 3rd years were even more advanced, but I didn’t get to speak with any 3rd years today. One of the pairs performed though, and that 3rd year student’s English was definitely very good. There were a few terribly shy students who didn’t speak much at all and just looked at you, so it was a one-sided conversation and us ALTs thinking of all the “What’s your favourite _____” questions possible! I hope they gain more confidence in speaking English through this summer school. After each round of 5 minutes, a student and ALT was picked to give some brief feedback, and most of the students said how they didn’t get a chance to speak English much, especially with a foreigner, so they really liked it and will work much harder/study more (all of them said the point about studying more). A lot of them were very shy and nervous too, even if their English was already quite good.

The next section of the day was speech planning. The aim of this mini Summer School was to have students prepare and present a speech, and be able to say it by the end of the 4-day summer school. Each student was paired with an ALT for this (I really do like the one-to-one thing they have going on here, as each student gets the amount of attention and help they need! Almost like having a private tutor). Today was just planning out the speech by brainstorming and drawing up an idea map. My student and I finished our idea map quite quickly (he chose to talk about Okonomiyaki!), so we moved onto writing the speech (I didn’t realize this was for tomorrow’s session…sorry my student!). The 1st day of summer school then ended here (12:00), and for the ALTs who had to go to school, we made our way back to work!

I arrived quite late at school (13:40?) but they still let me go home at 15:30 – they are all too nice here, seriously (a teacher just gave me a coffee jelly pudding thing!). It’s also super easy to take leave at this school – the vice principal is just so laid back and chill. I asked to take off next Thursday (we have 3 special days of leave for this summer holiday that we should use, because once summer holiday is over those leave days are gone!) and he’s just like yup sure! So nice. Once I arrived back home I just did some laundry and got ready to go to Tokyo tomorrow for the weekend!