Friday

Woke up at 7:15am to no water! I read the notice wrong and thought that it said no water from Friday 25th’s midnight till 5AM this morning, but I looked again and it was 5PM. Thankfully I keep a jug of cold drinking water in the fridge so I used that to brush my teeth and wash my face. Ate rice for breakfast and set off for school. I only have two lessons today and one of them is the play presentation, so it was a very free day indeed. In period 1 my JTE and I set up the gym ready for the play. At period 2, the 6th graders and 1st graders made their way in. Because my JTE had really set up the gym well (signs where each group should go for both the 1st and 6th graders), everyone was able to settle down very quickly. We’d also sorted out the props beforehand and placed them in each group’s little performance area so it was easy to start! Because there were so many groups performing at the same time and also a lot of 1st graders laughing, it was quite hard to hear all the lines being said. Several groups still put lots of emphasis into their actions though, so the 1st graders could still kind of follow the story. We did 1 round of plays and gave them time to ask questions and stuff, and then did round 2 of the plays, with the 6th graders shifting to their right to perform to a new group of 1st graders. After that we played Mr. Cat, what time is it? again, and this time it was much better than before. We got them to line up along the long side of the gym (I made the silly mistake last time of getting them to line up on the shorter side), and since they’d played it before, it was way smoother this time. We also got the 6th graders to hold hands with the 1st graders, and it was suuuuuuper cute. The 6th grade boys who like to act all big and tough had a 1st grader hanging onto each of their arms, it was adorable. Finished up after a few rounds and had them give the 6th graders one more round of applause, and then they went back to their classrooms while the 6th graders helped us clean up a bit. It was quite cute because we gave the 6th graders the option of returning or keeping their character masks, and most of them were like “Yay I’m going to take this home”, probably as a souvenir of their elementary school life.

Spent the spare period 3 and 4 reading and prepping for next week. Lunch today was Takasaki Don, corn + other veggies soup, and yoghurt with two strawberries! The strawberries were so super sweet, it was delicious. Cleaning time was very smooth today, because their homeroom teacher had had a talk with them. Since I was busy setting up stuff during yesterday’s cleaning time, the two trouble kids had gotten into an argument, so their homeroom teacher changed the cleaning partners around for today. 5-1 in period 5 today, and it was actually a pretty good lesson, except for the fact that they took forever to cut their food cards out of their textbooks, so we didn’t have time for fruits basket. But we still did the exchanging cards game where they would pretend to be waiters and customers. It was pretty good, I think most of them have got the hang of “How about~?” and the “Yes please” and “No thank you”, but then quite a few had forgotten “What would you like?” and “I’d like~” so it was like gain and loss at the same time. Got off work at 16:30 after having a meeting with one Grade 3 teacher, and leaving notes of Monday’s lesson plan for the other 2 teachers who were busy. Headed out again at 19:15 for dinner with two ALT friends at an Italian place.