Monday

Woke up at 7:10am, had rice and yuzu juice pickled vegetables for breakfast, and then drove to school. December is much more relaxed than November so far, I hardly have 5-6 class days anymore. Today was a nice standard four classes, and first up was 3-2 in period 2. It went pretty well again today, they’ve been pretty well behaved in the recent weeks. We didn’t have time to do the Pictionary relay at the end though, so it was just the colour bingo and shapes bingo. Still did alright though, and the most important thing was that they learnt how to say “What do you want?”. A few kept getting mixed up with “Where are you going?” from the last unit though! As they were filling out the evaluation cards at the end, they saw that the next lesson was making their own flag, and a lot of them got very excited. I thought that was very cute for 3-2, since they usually don’t show any interest or eagerness towards English much.

Next up was 3-3 and since they were one lesson behind, we did what 3-1 and 3-2 did last week. They went pretty crazy over the 1st team game – writing as many country names as they could in 3 minutes. It was pretty funny seeing the kids yelling at each other “AMERICA! AMERICA!” “KOREA” “NORTH KOREAAAA”. The kids here have such an obsession with North Korea, probably because of all the missile news before. Then we went through different countries’ flags, and their colours and shapes. For the last 3 hint quiz section, I gave them a hard one at the end (Egypt) and none of them got it so I had to show the flag. 3-1 was great as normal, but we just managed to play 1 round of the Pictionary relay. Japanese kids are such perfectionists – I didn't expect that filling in the bingo boxes would take so long, but they would colour each square in perfectly and draw the shapes using rulers and compasses. That’s why it took so long. But they still managed to learn and say out loud many times “What do you want?” and “I want (object)” so that was good.

Had lunch with 6-2 today, and they’re probably my favourite class out of the whole school if I had to choose (closely followed by all the 1st graders). Each of the kids in this class just have so much personality, and they’re very well mannered, despite how noisy or cheeky they may come off as. One of the kids came to get me from the staffroom since they were a bit late today with lunch prep because of music class. It was fun to see how the class is like during break times. A few of the boys who are super quiet during class were super talkative during lunchtime, and a few of the boys who are normally noisy in class, were dead silent during lunchtime and completely focused on eating. Then you’ve got the girls who were same as normal, and I found out who of the 6th graders goes to extra English classes outside of school, and they’re all girls. All 6 of them go to the same tutor. I also found out from one of the girls that she doesn’t like English because of third person pronouns (I learnt the Japanese word for this since they repeated it many times for me: 三人称単数) so I promised her to try find a way to explain it easier so that she could learn it, not find that part of English hard, and hopefully come to like English more!

Spent the lunch break outside playing jump rope with some different 2nd graders. They had gotten one of the long ropes and only had 2 people, so they saw me and grabbed me to help spin the rope for them. The kids here are seriously so good at jump rope! They’re like those ones you see in the videos online where it’s a whole line of kids running through the moving jump rope at super high speeds, never breaking the rhythm and never tripping. They move like a well-oiled machine, it’s insane. There were several groups of these long jump rope games going on, so there were a few 6th graders running and jumping through all of these ropes. It was pretty cool to see, they’ve all got a great sense of rhythm and athletic ability. Cleaning time had no major problems today, only a few minor scuffles at the beginning deciding who was in charge of cleaning which area, but the kids sorted it out themselves and I didn’t have to intervene. Last class of the day with 5-1, and we were on the small letters of the alphabet unit. A rather relaxed class today (for the teachers) since it was just writing practice using worksheets. We did some writing in the air to go through the stroke order, before letting them start on the worksheets. I played some English songs in the background to try and create a nice atmosphere for them to work in (worksheets can be pretty boring right) and it worked out pretty nice. The kids were like “what’s this??” at first, but settled into it and worked very nicely. It was Ed Sheeran playing but a few kids were like “Is this Justin Bieber?” to which I replied “No, it’s Ed Sheeran.” (they didn’t know who he was! Guess he’s not as popular in Japan as Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber) to which one boy replied “Good, I hate Justin Bieber” haha. Got off work at 16:00 since I didn't have much work to do, drove home and cleaned my car a little bit since the outside was so dirty from all my previous trips. Had nabe for dinner, and spent the rest of the night editing photos and videos.