Tuesday

January has flown by! February is around the corner, but I can’t wait for time to pass (even though it means the snow slowly melting and snowboarding season coming to an end) because it’ll mean BLACK PANTHER IN THE CINEMAS (Japan is so late as usual – it’ll come out in March for us), and then eventually INFINITY WAR. Anyway, woke up at 7:15am, rice for breakfast, and then drove to school. First up was 6-2 in period 1 and after finally finishing the Momotaro play unit, we moved onto the new topic “What do you want to be?” – jobs and occupations. We had quite a bit of admin stuff to do with 6-2 first before the lesson though – a survey about English lessons and how much they enjoy it, reflection on the Momotaro play, and handing out the vocab guide for the staircase English, and a photo printout of the Momotaro play presentation day that my JTE had very kindly made for everyone! So after all that admin stuff we only had time to introduce and practice all the jobs vocabulary, and then play the keyword game before time was up. Next up was 6-1 in period 2 and it was a solid lesson! Since they didn’t have to do the survey (only one class per year is required) we were able to do both the keyword game and the missing game, and they really enjoyed the missing game because I turned it into a team game with points. The only ones they had trouble with were “dentist” and “florist” because they kept saying “dental” and “flower”. One kid even shouted out “flower teacher” for florist haha.

Free time in periods 3 & 4 so I drew up an example family tree for tomorrow’s Grade 2 lesson and prepped for Grade 1’s lesson on Thursday too. Lunch with 2-3 again today and we had yakisoba! There was a lot leftover today so I had another serving of yakisoba. Played jump rope with the 2-3 kids at lunchtime and gave them piggyback rides as well. They made it into a game they called Koala though, literally coming up to me and being like “Jaime-sensei, KOALA!” which is the cue for a piggyback ride. Cleaning time was smooth today until the end when they do their little reflection meeting. They were just being silly and one kid was talking over another kid, so it was a bit rough. Still managed to finish in the end, and made them promise to do better tomorrow. Another interesting thing that happened during cleaning was when one of the girls told me her dreams were to become a designer, take her parents to Disneyland, and that her most important dream is to not make her parents sad. What a mature 2nd grader! This conversation came about because there were the 6th graders’ calligraphy being displayed in the corridor, and it said “Realise your dreams”. Last class of the day with 5-2 in period 6, and we did the same lesson as 5-1 on Friday. Got off work at 16:10 after finishing the meeting with the Grade 2 teachers, and went to the drugstore again, since I had mistakenly bought fabric softener yesterday instead of laundry detergent!