Tuesday

Woke up at 7:15am, had yesterday’s dinner leftovers for breakfast, then drove to school. First up today was 6-2 in period 1, and we finished off the jobs unit by doing the last textbook activity. The classroom computer wasn't working so I just read out the listening passage. The kids did fine, and it was funny cause they were all like “EH??” in unison when I said the Finnish character’s name. After that we covered how to say their reasons for wanting to do the job they want to (“Why?” “Because…”), and then time ran out before we could play any games so we just left it at that. Another interesting note was that their homeroom teacher was telling us about some kids’ speeches (some of them said they’re looking forward to English in junior high, some said that even though it was sad when the old ALT left, they were happy that I came) that moved her, and she also told us how these current 6th graders weren’t always this good haha! Apparently when they were 5th graders, they were quite the handful too. But when they became 6th graders they mellowed out and matured a lot. I hope this applies to the current 5th graders too since they can be a handful, but they’re becoming 6th graders soon! 6-1 had already done the textbook activity previously, so we were able to play Fruits Basket (Jobs Basket) after finishing the reasons section.

Periods 3 & 4 free so I just read and relaxed. Also, the principal told me about how from April this year (the new school year), there’ll be a new thing we do where a junior high school JTE (so a proper Japanese teacher of English) will come and teach 1 of the 2 hours 6th grade has. So eventually there’s going to be 3 teachers in the room! I remember the BOE mentioning something like this before, because they want to integrate the English education across all school levels, so they’re having the junior high school teachers go to elementary schools to teach English once a week. It’s definitely an interesting proposal and I’m not too sure how helpful it’s going to be, but at least Japan is trying (and actually making changes) to change things about their English education. I wonder how lesson planning meetings are going to work though, because at the moment it sounds like the JHS JTE will only come once a week for the English lesson, so it’s going to be difficult to time meetings. I also feel a little sorry towards the JHS JTEs who will get this role, because it’ll mean a lot more work (not to mention the extra commuting) for them, when they’re already so busy with their own schools. Still, I’m very interested to see how it’ll turn out. I hope the JTE that’ll come to our school is the one that I know from Tuesday badminton! Lunch today with 5-1 again and we had miso oden, soup, bread, and an orange slice. The kids were a bit less talkative today, only asking me a few questions today (do you have any pets? What’s your favourite anime?).

Back to back lessons in periods 5 & 6 with 5-2. We started on the final versions of their picture book pages. It was a great 2 hours, as they were all working very hard – probably because my JTE said they could do their homework/free reading time when they finished. 5-2 has some seriously good artists, and we got some amazing artwork! We also had them memorise the picture book lines, and have them make absolutely sure they could say it all smoothly and clearly, since they’ll be presenting this to the 2nd graders. They were all trying super hard to memorise the lines, and it was really adorable seeing them all muttering the lines to themselves many times before coming to us teachers for the final check. I was also really happy to see the kids coming up to me on their own initiative to ask me to teach them the correct pronunciation – they weren’t just trying to memorise it for the sake of it, but they actually wanted to get the proper pronunciation down. After lessons finished I had the meeting for tomorrow’s lesson with the Grade 2 teachers. They were all telling me how the 2nd graders did great for their Brown Bear reading presentation thing. The only thing they tripped up on was saying “I see a children looking at me”. Got off work at 16:20 after finishing up tomorrow’s poster example.