Thursday

Woke up at 7:15am and had rice for breakfast, then drove to school. The school’s been running on the special schedule where they start 10 minutes earlier for everything, and it’s really nice to have the broadcast kids remind us about it every morning haha. I would totally forget if they didn’t. First up was 4-1 and we were making the Thank You cards. They were all working so hard on their cards, it was so adorable to watch! The cards were a bit small since we didn't have that much card paper, so the writing space was quite small as a result, but they did great writing tiny and neat! One of the kids asked me how to write “Thank you for weeding the garden” haha. We then took a class photo at the end, and although I thought the 4th graders are pretty outgoing, they definitely weren’t as crazy as the 2nd graders when taking photos! 1-1 up next in period 2 and it was a high energy, noisy lesson all the way through. We played just two of the revision games I planned since the 2nd one took up a lot more time than expected. They remembered maybe 80% of all the vocab we’ve learnt? And then maybe about 10% they could remember with hints, and 10% I had to full on tell them cause they’d just forgotten. We took a class photo at the end again. I’m so happy that my school is way on the chill side about things. At dinner yesterday, other ALTs’ schools don’t seem to allow the ALTs to use phones, or the ALT hasn't tried taking class photos or videos of performances, so I’m really thankful my school lets me do things very freely!

1-2 was also a little noisy today, but at a controllable level. Everyone was just like YAY GAMES when I wrote out the lesson schedule on the board. I think they can all recognize the word for “game” now, since as soon as I start writing the letter “G” they’re all just like “GAME!?!?” haha. We ran a bit overtime with the game and thus with the photo taking, and there was one kid who was throwing a bit of a minor tantrum so when I looked at the photo later, I saw that I perfectly captured his sulky face, awh dear! But he looks too cute haha, those pouty cheeks. 1-3 was very perfect yet again, but a few individual kids were a bit more hyper than usual, which I found interesting. They were super cute during photos – when was like “Happy photo!” for the 3rd shot, they were all like “HAPPYYYYYY” and doing cute and funny poses.

Lunchtime with 6-2 again, it’s my last lunch with them ever! It was a lot of fun again today with a lot of random conversation. One of the kids started randomly dancing, and he even did a snippet of one of SMAP’s dances (although I don't know any of SMAP dances, sorry kid!). There’s one kid in 6-2 who has just started randomly saying “gorilla” to me every time he sees me (I think it’s because he likes saying the word, and also because he played a gorilla in the 6th graders’ play), so I started saying back to him “koala” because he always looks a little sleepy like a koala. One of the other girls watching agreed and was like “you do look like a koala!”. Cleaning time was very rough today. Moody girl was fine, but moody boy was very very not fine, so I just left him crying in the corridor – he’s the type that will go back to normal once you stop giving attention to him. 4-2 in period 5 and it was such a busy lesson because they were all wanting to write their own messages, and not the template messages written on the board, so I had to go around to each kid and write out what they wanted. Plus one of the girls threw a bit of a mini tantrum because of some trivial thing, so my JTE had her hands full with that, and then during photo time, one kid was doing his best to not be in the photo so that was a bit annoying, but yea…it all worked out in the end, but was just a bit of a rough way to end the last lesson with them! Spent the spare 6th period burning my video montage onto a DVD (the school has tons of blank ones free for use!) and then testing it out on the broadcast system, and it worked absolutely fine yay!! The teachers were all like “Woooow how did you make thaaat” and were absolutely amazed at it, but it’s all just the program doing everything so I felt kinda funny haha. Got off work at 16:10 and drove home.