Wednesday

Woke up at 7:00am this morning to no alarm – turns out I had forgotten to set my alarm last night!! Good thing I seem to have a slight body alarm, otherwise I don't know what I would’ve done if I overslept and was late!!! Had rice and corn soup for breakfast, and then cycled to school. The days keep getting cooler and cooler so it’s so lovely. First three periods were with the 2nd graders. We had moved on from “My Town” to “What’s this?” focusing on daily objects found in the classroom (mainly stationary). All the classes loved the stationary song I had found on Youtube (so handy – there were no songs specifically about stationary in the school’s English CD collection, so Youtube it is!). They found the chant a bit challenging because the clapping rhythm is pretty hard to follow along with. They all did pretty well with the stationary vocab – just had to go over “blackboard” and “ruler” a few times. The picture of the ruler was blue, so they kept saying “blue-rer”. As expected, words with both “r” and “l” in it are difficult for Japanese people to say! We also had a lot of fun with the game as well, they all participated more than I thought they would, and didn’t find it boring so that’s great. 2-3 is really the class that is the best at English, and I think this really reflects their homeroom teacher’s attitude to English. When the homeroom teacher is really active and enthusiastic about English, their kids are too.

Had an empty period in period 4, so I made some powerpoints for next week’s 4th grade lesson. Lunch today with 2-2 again, and I sat with the 2nd row this time. We had rice with bits of sweet potato, sanma (fish), tofu soup, and mitarashi dango for dessert! There were a lot of leftovers today because a lot of kids don’t like fish, so I helped eat the leftover rice and stuff. The kids were doing janken for the last few dango though, it was so cute. Spent the lunchtime in with the kids today again. We drew pictures, some kids were playing pretend school (what cuties – even though they’re in school already, during play time they still play school!), and I braided a few girls’ hair. Cleaning time was pretty smooth today because I had promised them stickers if they cleaned well. It is pretty amazing how much power stickers have over kids here! Even the kid who was like “Nah I don't need stickers” got drawn in in the end. The little group of 2nd graders that I’m in charge of even got praised by the 6th graders so that was cute.

Last two periods of the day with the 5th graders! We were starting the Plus 2 section today which was on more alphabet lessons, but this time the focus is on writing. We started out with finishing off the quiz presentations from last time (the kids really like it), and then moved onto a warm up game. I would say a letter, the kids would grab that letter card AND have to say a word that starts with that letter. They did pretty well in this, even with the tricky letters like “V” (volleyball, violin) and “Y” (Youtube haha). There was still some confusion between “R” and “L” (some kids said “lemon” for “R”) and “B” and “V” (they couldn't hear the difference). We then did writing practice where we focused on the stroke order for the letters. In the previous unit there were a lot of kids who wrote their letters in funny ways. They all did pretty well, 5-1 lost a bit of focus in the end since they were in 6th period, but most kids still worked very hard to write the neatest letters. They were so serious about it! Like the letters they wrote were already neat and perfect, but they would rub it out and write it again and again to perfect it. That dedication.

Got off work at 16:00, cycled home, had kimchi udon for dinner. Then headed to badminton at 19:00. I love how this one is just so close to my home. Had another great night of badminton! This group is more hardout than the Tuesday night one, so you really get a good night of exercise in. One of the uncles there is a coach for a junior high school girls’ badminton team, and he invited me to go see their training and play with them one day! So nice.