Flat tire again!?

Woke up at 7:15am, had rice for breakfast, then drove to school. Spent the morning working on the classroom English cards hanging shelf thingies, and then had class with 5th grade in the afternoon. 5-2 first in period 4, and because they’re last year’s 4th graders, the lesson was absolutely perfect! Even their homeroom teacher (it’s her first time teaching English with me, because of the change in the English teaching roster here at my school) commented on how great the lesson was/kids were. It was a really fun lesson. We have the new textbook, and unit 1 is on self-introductions. We started again with the “Small Talk” section, and like the 6th graders yesterday, it worked really well again today as well! The kids really seem to like listening to English (they really pay a lot of attention). I swear they put all of last year’s best 4th graders into 5-2. Not only are the majority of all the enthusiastic kids in this class, they’ve also got all the smart ones (the ones that are pretty good at English) in here. Very interesting combination. After the small talk section, we had a warm up activity where the kids did self introductions with each other. A few kids were having fun with the “I like…” part of the self-intro, because they were saying “I LIKE DARTH VADAR” and “ I LIKE STORM TROOPER”. Man I love these kids. We then did the listening activity in the textbook, which they did perfectly, and only needed to listen to each listening passage once! Finished off with the textbook “let’s play!” activity, where the kids had to guess my favourite things. There were many a loud “AWH…”s when they guessed wrong, and many “YAAAAAAY”s when they guessed right. All in all a very fun lesson, and I’m really looking forward to what the 5th graders will be achieving this year!

Lunch in the staffroom again today and we had a very spring seasonal menu – rice mixed with spring vegetables, soup with mochi in it, and salad. There was a lot of leftover rice so the tea-lady slipped me a bag to take home (she even put it into a large paper envelope to be doubly secret!). Cleaning time was super smooth again today, ah how I wish the baby 1st graders (well now 2nd graders, it’ll take me a while to get used to their new grade title!) would keep their adorable obedience and desire to please you. 5-1 in period 5, and they’re definitely a lot quieter and less participative (at first) than 5-2 – it’s like a repeat of last year’s 4-1 and 4-2 all over again, even though the kids have been mixed up. It was still a good lesson because their homeroom teacher really is a great teacher (last year’s 3-1 teacher). So even though it was a bit of awkward start (no one putting up their hands, forgetting how to say the date/day, etc.) it still finished off as a pretty good lesson. Definitely a lot more English in the lessons this year, as both the homeroom teachers and myself are making a massive effort to use minimal (practically no) Japanese. It was also cute because during the ending greetings when I say “See you!” to the kids, their homeroom teacher said “See you on Friday” and then to the kids in Japanese “because 5th graders have 2 hours of English every week” and the kids were like “YAAAAAY” which made me really happy. In the spare 6th period, my JTE and I did the recording for the picture book reading for English broadcasts. We went to the library to originally get my picture book I brought over from NZ as a gift to the school, but discovered that the library actually has quite the selection of English picture books, so we chose one of those instead. We ended up with “Guri and Gura”, which is actually a Japanese story, but just the English version. This actually works really well because the kids practically all know the story already (my JTE said they should all know it from preschool cause it’s that famous of a story), so even if they don’t understand the English, they’ll still know the story. Got off work at 16:20 and went home, only to find I got a flat tire (again…man this needs to stop!!!!) so I drove out again to get that fixed…thankfully it didn’t cost anything to get it fixed.