Tuesday

Woke up at 7:15am today, had the apple that my librarian gave me, and cornflakes for breakfast, and cycled to school. Another nice busy day today with 5 classes, all with 5th and 6th grade. First up was 6-2 and it was a great class. They were really well behaved today and tried their best! My JTE said that since we hadn’t had English with 6-2 for so long, some of them were asking “When’s English” and “Why don’t we have English” which was cute. They did great writing down all the new vocab/sentences (schedule stuff like “get up” “eat breakfast” etc.) and they really enjoyed the keyword game, going wild when they got the eraser. We didn’t have time to do bingo so we saved that for the next lesson, and ended with just the keyword game. 6-1 was a bit more restless and less well behaved, but they also still enjoyed the keyword game (they were just a bit slower writing the vocab out, and we had to keep reminding them to do their work instead of messing around).

Next up was 5-2 in period 3, and it was a fairly standard lesson hour. They weren’t too rowdy today but they weren’t the most well behaved either. The beginning half was definitely a bit more messy (not everyone was doing the textbook activity or repeating the vocab after me), but the second half (thinking up hints for the words to prep for the quiz) was much better. The kids were trying their best to think up hints for everything and it was good! Had a break in period 4 which was nice. Spent the spare time catching up on my blog entries. Lunch today again with 4-1 and they’re such a fun class. I have no idea why 4th grade is so innocent and pure, but they’re really good kids and I hope they stay this way! The kids whose names I had remembered were so happy when I said their name – they were literally like “YAY YOU REMEMBERED MY NAME!” in the loudest happiest voices. Lunch today was flat udon noodles in soup, bread with plum jam, and some Japanese vegetable thing with konnyaku. 4-1 does things a bit different where the kids who are on 給食 duty will go around collecting people’s plates as they’ve finished eating, instead of the kids themselves going up at the end to return their plates. Spent the lunchtime outside playing tag with a group of 1st graders. There were so many games of tag going on at the same time between different grades though – it was so funny. Cleaning time was so much smoother today – made sure to get there early in the beginning to allocate the cleaning areas myself so that the kids (mainly just the one girl) wouldn't get in a fuss. They were very good today so they got their stickers.

Last stretch of the day! 5-1 in period 5 and 5-2 again in period 6. 5-1 was fine and thought of their words + hints well enough. 5-2 took a lot longer to prep their quizzes before they could present. It’s always a bit exasperating when we do these type of making quiz activities, because the kids will think of tons of words which they obviously don’t know in English (i.e. “experiment”) instead of sticking to using words they do now (i.e. “science”) so a lot of time is lost with me telling them the English vocab for their hint words, and I feel like English learning doesn’t happen. They’re just writing down what I tell them quickly because everyone has different hint words, so they’re not properly remembering the hint vocab. We still had a few people present at the end and a few of the boys were being funny, putting on their “teacher” act. Got off work a bit late today at 16:45 because the meeting with the 2nd grade teachers stretched out. 2-3’s homeroom teacher had made new sets of the “jobs” flashcards and playing cards, so we cut them out together. She even made a song video, using the song from the Genki English CD but putting it over her own pictures and stuff! It was super cool. Cycled home and had dumplings, then set off to watch Thor (!!!!) with some other ALTs to celebrate an ALT’s birthday. Made a quick stop at the supermarket to pick up some snacks on the way. Thor was a solid movie – a lot of humor in this movie and Cate Blanchett was great as always.