Tuesday

Woke up at 7:00am, had rice for breakfast, cleared the snow off my car, and then drove to school. Quite a few teachers took the morning off because of the snow, but there were still a lot of teachers around shovelling the snow at school to clear the paths for the kids coming later on. Not much to do in the first 2 periods since the kids weren't here yet, so my usual period 1 & 2 classes were cancelled. Made some powerpoints for future lessons and did some prep for future lunchtime English broadcasts. A lot of kids actually started coming in super early (a lot earlier than the planned 10:00~10:20 time slot) to play in the snow and have snowball fights in the school grounds. It was super cute hearing them play from the staffroom. The teachers were super organised and went to turn on the heaters in their classrooms so that when the kids came in from their snowball fights they could dry out in the classroom.

My JTE was able to push through with the schedule changes so that we could have one last practice with the 6th graders before the final presentation on Friday. 6-2 in period 3 and we had one of the more polished groups (the perfect Disney group) perform their play in front of the class to set an example. They did a great job, and two of the girls had even got together in their own time to make a giant peach for their play! Super cute. We then spent the rest of the lesson practicing and making final props. All of 6-2’s groups are doing good, so no worries about their performance at all. Some of the kids still need to look at their scripts since they haven’t memorised their lines (some are really struggling to) so I let them have the scripts. As long as they’re able to say their lines properly, it’s ok to have some help. 6-1 has a few more groups that I’m a little apprehensive about, but it’s only 2 groups. The rest are fine and I was very pleasantly surprised by one group who had all their lines memorised, especially because it’s two kids who usually struggle a bit with English, but they had their lines all memorised! I was so proud, they really worked hard.

Lunch was cream stew with bread, ham and salad, super delicious! 2-1 was great again as usual. Today was a little different since one of the school lunch staff came to do a little quiz and talk about the equipment in the kitchen. It was fun seeing the kids guess what the tools/machines were (someone said rubbish pin for the giant potato peeler machine!) and also the questions they asked at the end were hilarious (how many knives does the kitchen have? How many centimetres high is the fridge?). Did a super quick play practice with 4-2 during the lunch break because they were all itching to outside and play in the snow. Cleaning time was a breeze, I’m glad that both the hyper girl and boy have been in good moods so far this week. Back to back lessons with 5-2 in periods 5 and 6, but they both went really well. It was a bit noisy but after calling out individual names they’d focus again, and for the last activity (guessing what was on my menu by asking “How about (food)?”) even the chatty kids got interested and put up their hands to guess. The rhythm chant game still failed in this class though, I guess saying a ton of English along with a rhythm is too hard for them still! We finished quite on time for period 6, so while they were writing their reflection cards I went around to kids who had finished and did mini conversations with them. They really liked this, since not all of them put up their hands in class (so they don’t get much speaking practice/chances) and they answered perfectly and with little smiles on their faces. Got off work at 16:10 after finishing up the meeting with the 2nd grade teachers. Went to fuel up after work before driving home.