Friday

Woke up at 7:15am, had rice for breakfast, threw out the rubbish, and then drove to school. Pretty relaxed day today with only 3 classes. First up was 6-2 and it was just a chill lesson because we were making the masks for their Momotaro plays. It was really nice to just colour the masks alongside them, help them cut out the masks as well, and they were all just chatting casually to us teachers as well, lovely atmosphere all around. A lot more kids have memorized their lines so I’m pretty confident they’ll be able to perform the play well on presentation day! 6-1 was also good today, the kid who was playing all 3 minions was very happy with his masks. 6-1 is still on the upper hand in terms of more people having their lines memorized, and just more cohesive, put together play practices in general, which is still a bit of a surprise for me! But it’s super nice to see.

In the 20 minute break today my JTE and I went to the 4th graders to practice their plays with them. Unfortunately their homeroom teachers forgot about the practice, and there were other marching band practices going on, so we couldn't get the whole group (group 1 for today) together. We managed to practice with like 3 or 4 members of the group, and made sure to let the other members know we’d be practicing at lunchtime. Spent the free periods 3 and 4 making lesson and English board materials. Lunch today was mapo tofu but with some vegetable and turnip, which is pretty rare for mapo tofu! The tea lady had also brought in some homemade pickled turnip that her dad had made apparently, and it was delicious! The teachers were all surprised at how much I liked pickles, but I think a lot of foreigners like them too!? Anyway, the lunchtime practice with the 4th graders was great – we found they’re able to focus a lot more when it’s a specialized practice like this, and they can say their lines absolutely fine! It’s probably just cause class time is a bit messy and loud which is why they’re all a bit slow with their lines and performance and stuff. Period 5 with 5-1 and it was an average lesson again. We thought they would enjoy this lesson because it was a fun one where they were drawing ice cream parfaits for each other, and practicing how to ask “What do you want?” and answering “(fruit) please”, but there was just a lot of talking/murmuring whilst someone else (the teacher, or another fellow student) was talking, so it really lowered the class time quality. I feel like we’ve totally lost respect from the 5-1 kids, which is a bit sad. My Japanese isn’t quite good enough to tell them off or give them a stern talk, so I wish my JTE would do that, but she doesn’t really tell them off either. They’re not completely all the way disobedient – like they’ll still stop talking when we tell them to stop, but they’ll just start up again a few minutes later, so it really feels quite rude and slack. Hopefully it’ll improve in the future. Got off work today at 16:30 after finishing the meeting with the 3rd grade teachers for Monday’s lesson. It was nice today because 3-1’s teacher initiated the meeting after noticing all the teachers had gathered!