Friday

Woke up at 7:10am, I think I’ve gotten a lot faster at doing things with one hand! I even had time spare this morning. Had rice for breakfast and then set off for school. Had an extremely free spare 1st period since my JTE told me that the school tries to not say anything about Valentines Day because the kids aren’t allowed to bring chocolates or anything like that to school, so that means I don't need to work on my Valentines Day themed board anymore! I was going to get the kids to colour in chocolates that I had drawn up, so that's full on pushing the chocolate agenda so woops! First up today was 6-1 in period 2. Absolutely every single kid was in masks cause of the flu scare going round school! When I saw that I thought that I should wear a mask too but I didn't have any on me sadly. Anyway, it was a very fun lesson today because we were working on job quizzes, but it was the kids’ own dream jobs, so it was a lot of fun both for them, and for us teachers too, to find out each kids’ dream job (most notable were a Disneyland worker and a company president). They had to draw pictures of objects their dream job uses (e.g. stethoscope, hammer, etc.) and what they like (e.g. animals, characters, reading, etc). I love these kinds of lessons the most because there’s a lot of learning actually happening, and the best thing is the kids enjoying the lesson too. I did notice a few kids writing a word in mixed upper and lowercase letters when I was spelling the word out for them. That's something that my JTE keeps telling them to fix since she came from teaching at a junior high school – the English teacher at the junior high school she used to work at told her to push the 6th graders, because a lot of the new junior high school students still cant write their alphabet properly, so they always have to spend the first few lessons brushing that up.

Free periods in 3 & 4 so I just read (found a PDF version of LOTR). There’s really not a lot of lesson prep work for me to do, which I am kind of thankful for with only having one hand to currently use, but it does make time go a lot more slowly with no actual “work” to do. Lunch today was rice, salmon, egg and seaweed and carrot soup, and a side of stewed Japanese vegetables. I was able to open the milk pack today somehow with just my left hand yay! For some reason the 2nd graders didn't have to clean today (I think they had a trip or early ending time because they were packing their bags when I peeked into their classrooms) so I just sat in the staffroom during cleaning time instead. 5-1 in period 5 and it was a bit of a noisy class today. They were drawing their own original pages for “My Pet”, and everyone was up and out of their seats seeing what animals everyone was drawing, and checking out each other’s drawings and stuff. A lot of kids were drawing way faster than we planned for, so my JTE and I couldn’t get round to all of them to help them with the English vocab. There was also one instance where one kid drew an ugly picture on another kid’s sheet, so he cried, and my JTE had to take the other kid out to talk to him. It was such a relief to walk into a happy and peaceful 6-2 class for period 6 – even my JTE breathed a sigh of relief and was like “Ahh what a difference 6th grade is” haha. They were great today as usual and we got them to draw their pictures first, giving my JTE and myself time to walk around helping them with the English vocab without wasting time and having them wait. The only interesting job from 6-2 was Youtuber (haha), and there were quite a few bakers and soccer players, plus a doctor and lawyer!

Got off work at 16:05 to quickly go home and pack the rest of my stuff for this weekend’s Hakuba trip! Set off again at 16:40 to pick up two other ALT friends. We decided to just buy some food from the convenience store and eat on the road. The drive to the lodge took just under 2.5 hours, and it was a very smooth drive. I was a teeny bit disappointed that we didn't have the whole place to ourselves as the Airbnb listing originally said we would, but the place was very nice and new and clean so it was still pretty good. The lodge was actually owned and ran by Chinese people, so that was interesting. Our group (of twelve people!) started to arrive in their respective carpool groups one by one, and we just hung out in the living room area until everyone arrived, then went to sleep.