Monday

Woke up at 7:00am, rice for breakfast, and then cycled to school. One of the 3rd grade classes got cancelled today since they had some other event going on in period 3, so I was only left with 4 classes today! First up was 5-2 and we did the 2nd row’s quiz presentations, and then spent the rest of the time playing the castle quiz game. I’m glad the kids really like it, because before I even told them what we were doing for today’s class, they were already like “Are we playing the castle game today!?” cuties. I got the some kids to do the card-holding and asking “What’s this?” and a lot of the kids who never put up their hands for anything in English volunteered! Thankful for whoever invented this game – it has won over a lot of my tougher students! They’re also getting better at pronouncing the words – mainly because I’m strict in the game, and that if they don’t say the word with great pronunciation, it won’t get a point. So now they know to stress the long ‘o’ sound for “globe”, and they try their best to pronounce the ‘v’ for “glove”. Great work guys!!!

2nd period was 3-2, and although it was SUPER noisy and rowdy today, I still kind of counted it as an enjoyable/successful class, just because the kids looked like they were enjoying English/the lesson. We were doing the “Let’s Travel!” unit and started off with the song and accompanying animation again. The kids love the CD’s cheap as animations cause they’re so cheap that it’s hilarious. Today was no exception with the kids going crazy throughout the whole song. They remembered the vocab very well at a very fast rate too. Karuta was also pretty successful but for some reason a lot of them mixed up “home” and “pool” – do those two words sound similar at all!? But it was a good lesson overall. 3-1’s teacher commented on the noise later though – he was asking “The lesson sounded very crazy and fun today for 3-2?”. 3-1 was absolutely great today – they’re such a good class. I think it also helps that their homeroom teacher has a good attitude towards English so they do too. They also remembered the vocab extremely fast, but as expected “shrine” is still hard to pronounce. Karuta was good and we even got to play 2 rounds!

Lunch with 4-2 this week and they’re another super affectionate class. Even though they’re grade 4, they’re just as affectionate as grades 1 or 2. They were all asking me a lot of questions, but I felt really bad because I couldn't hear them very well (I was sitting at the very front of the classroom behind the long desk) so I had to keep getting them to repeat themselves. Got to learn a bit about some students though, like who had siblings, a lot told me their favourite number (since we were on favourites for Grade 4) and the reasons why (birthdays, it’s a “nice” rounded number, etc.). Spent the lunchtime inside today working on the new nametags. Cleaning time was a breeze today since it’s all the good kids. My little corridor area has now successfully turned into the English cleaning corner, which I’m very happy about. They’ll say “rubbish!” for all the rubbish/dust they see on the floor, and when they’re done they’ll say “finished!” proudly. Gave them little smiley stickers today for their reward.

Last class of the day with 5-1 and it was a bit of a crazy class today. They just wouldn't really settle down or be quiet. The poor studious kids were repeatedly saying “静かにしてください” but they were just drowned out by the others. We barely got through all the activities but they still got fired up for the castle game at the end. My JTE also actually really liked the card exchanging game, because she liked how they had to say lots of the different vocab because of the card exchanging. I was a bit more disappointed with it because it didn’t seem like a lot of them were doing it properly though. Let’s hope it improves on Wednesday when the BOE comes to observe! Got off work at 16:40 today since I stayed a bit to keep working at the nametags. Cycled home and had udon for dinner.