Friday

Woke up at 7:00am, rice for breakfast, and then set off for school. A rather relaxed day today with only two lessons to teach. First up was 6-1 in period 2 and we finished up the presentations and then did the textbook listening activity. At yesterday’s office day they were mentioning how a lot of kids real life conversation listening skills aren’t good because they only get to listen to textbook CDs robotic skits, and we just replay it for them as many times as they like, so when it comes to real world conversations, or even just conversations with each other, they just can’t catch the answers. I’m pretty proud of my 6th graders though, cause they always do pretty well in listening activities, and also whenever we have presentations my JTE makes sheets with everyone’s names on it, and the kids listening to the presentation have to write down what the presenter is saying (e.g. in this dream job unit, the listeners have to note down what the presenter has, likes, has, and wants to be) so their listening is pretty good, even in our conversation activities.

Spent the spare periods 3 & 4 printing and photocopying worksheets for Grade 3’s alphabet lesson on Monday. Lunch today was mixed rice, deep fried seaweed fish thingy, and 豚汁. During the lunchtime broadcast one kid kept making mistakes and laughing, so the more experienced 6th grader (he’s got a great presenter’s voice) had to step in haha. Cleaning time was fun because the 2nd graders were having their class presentation thing to their parents, so they were just reciting Brown Bear super loudly in the corridor as they cleaned. Next class was 5-1 in period 5 and we started on the final versions of each kids’ picture book pages. They all took a lot longer to draw up their pages than we thought! It’s nice to see them taking it so seriously, but at the same time they were going at it veeeery slowly so it’s like…speed up the pace just a liiittle bit guys! A lot of them were being fussy about not being able to draw people, but they were just being perfectionists cause when I looked at their drawings they were absolutely fine. Period 6 was free because 6-2 was having their open lesson thing where parents can come and watch. Got off work promptly at 16:00 today because the 3rd grade teachers were super on time today with the meeting! I truly am grateful for 3-1’s teacher always asking “Next week’s lesson, meeting?”, it’s just so nice to have HRTs that are helpful in terms of English. At yesterday’s office day, you definitely heard about a lot of apathetic HRTs and lots of ALTs really having a hard time from that. Went quickly home to drop off some stuff and pick up some stuff before heading out to the station again to pick up/meet up with my close friends from NZ!!! I was very happy to see this friend because I had missed her wedding cause of the JET program timing! Met up with them at the station, and since we had some time spare we went to take some sticker photos before going to have dinner at a yakiniku buffet place (牛角). Everything was super delicious! We made a mistake with cooking the premium steak though – you’re supposed to cook it in the foil plate that has the garlic and butter in it, but we didn't realize that you’re supposed to do that so we were just grilling it directly on the BBQ. We only realized our mistake after I finally saw the picture explaining the cooking method on the back of the menu! After we finished dinner we went back to my place to drop off their luggage, digest a bit, and then go onsen! Even though it was my friends’ first time to experience an onsen in Japan, they really enjoyed it, and we all felt super sleepy afterwards with the meat buffet and onsen combination.