Thursday

Time seriously passes so fast – can’t believe my first week of school is nearly finished! Woke up with my body feeling super tired today – I guess the excitement is wearing off and the fatigue is finally kicking in! Set off a bit later today because of the tiredness so I arrived at school just as they were closing the gate. We had a staff meeting this morning and they talked about the evacuation practice happening today in period 3.

First class of today was period one with the 4th graders! It was my first class with them so it was still the self-intro lesson. It’s interesting to see the transition period of students between being enthusiastic in grades 1-3, and a bit more cool/shy in grades 5-6. The 4th graders were still pretty responsive (they especially loved the food pictures in my powerpoint), and I’m still just so impressed by how the students give their attention to the teacher – as in they properly face and look at the teacher, instead of looking at their desks, out the window, doodling, etc. The first 4th grade class was also quite affectionate. All of them had the previous ALT’s signature and doodle on their folders!

Next class was the 1st graders. The 1st and 2nd graders have to be the most enthusiastic students ever. 1st graders were a step up, because the WHOLE class put their hands up to answer questions, but at least a quarter of them didn’t know the answer but still put their hands up anyway! They’re very cute – they’ll shoot their hands up and then say sheepishly “I forgot” straightaway. Their participative spirit here is so cute. Also, this class already knew the answers to my powerpoint questions because of their older siblings in the other classes! I didn't expect that to happen. Glad to know they seem to be talking about me/English class at home! We did some revision on fruits, colours, and numbers, and they know it all really well. I did the grouping game for number revision, and they’re so hilarious running around the class literally hugging and grabbing people to make groups. One really good things about the 1st graders is the copying they do. Whenever I say any word in English they’ll copy me and repeat it. Other grades don’t really do this but I wish they did. I guess it’s just a thing with being younger and copying what people say from curiosity and enthusiasm.

The school had an earthquake drill at 10:30. Basically they would announce over the speakers “an earthquake is happening!” and you had to squat down under your tables/chairs, and if you were in the corridor you would squat down, protect your head, and move away from the windows. We held this position for a 5 minutes, and then they gave the notice to move outside into the grounds. It was really interesting to see, because all the classrooms have these cushion hat thingies (1st graders ones were red so they all looked like strawberries) to protect the students’ heads, so they were wearing these colourful cones on their heads running outside. They lined up in the years and classes, and the principal gave a report on how they did and some reminders. After that there period 3 was replaced with the morning break, since that was taken up by the earthquake drill.

My next class was period 4 with the second class of 1st graders. This was the class I’d been eating lunch with so they were quite familiar. I still can’t remember everyone’s names yet! Faces are easy to recognize, but there’s a lot of common names (Yui, Koutarou, Aoi, etc.) so it’ll take me some time to learn all the names, but I hope I can do it! I found today’s lunch really interesting because we got 揚げパン which is literally deep fried bread, sprinkled with sugar! It’s basically a doughtnut, which is why I was surprised! Doughnuts for lunch, what a cool as school. The sides were tuna cucumber salad, and wonton soup! One of the 1st graders tooth fell out at lunch today! She sat inside for the rest of break time. The English Corner activity is really a hit. There are still students running around during breaks finding them all. Some of the kids actually have really neat handwriting, despite not having learnt the alphabet officially yet! I also really admire how they participated without knowing they’d get stickers/any rewards. One of the 1st graders pulled me aside to play his own handmade board game with him. It was hilarious – certain squares had things like “move forward 100 squares” off the board. Cutie.

After lunch and cleaning it was 5th period with the second 4th grade class! Self intro went pretty good, and this class was also very responsive – probably more so than the first 4th grade class. They had a lot of cheeky kids in this class, but it was good cause it gets the class more active. We were revising occupations, and I had to make sure to teach them the difference between “pilot” and “pirate” because the Japanese have it hard differentiating the “l” and “r” sounds. It was pretty funny though, because they thought it’s much cooler to be a pirate instead of a pilot, so they kept purposely saying pirate! Another interesting I learnt today is that 1st to 4th grades get to finish at 15:00, whilst 5th and 6th grades finish at 15:30. Finished work today at 16:15 and cycled back home to have dumplings for dinner