1st Graders have so much energy

Woke up at 7:15am, had rice for breakfast, and set off for school. Today was a rare rainy day. Spent the morning cutting and trimming the candy cards, and then got a chest x-ray done. It seems to be a regular thing in Japan here, with all the staff in school getting it done. A special car actually came to the school to get it done, instead of us having to go to the health centre during work time. First English lesson ever for the 1st graders today! Had 1-1 in period 2, and it was a 200% high-energy class all the way through. These new 1st graders are definitely as energetic, if not more, than last year’s one. They’re all so innocent and cute and just so curious about anything, and they’re so not shy at all! I was just walking into the classroom and they were already all crowding around, and some of them who have older siblings in this school were like “ARE YOU JAIME-SENSEI” “HI JAIME-SENSEI” and just non-stop talking about absolutely everything. It was also a lot of fun to see who the new sibling pairs were. It was definitely also quite a challenging lesson, just in terms of having to teach English from scratch. Some of the kids have learnt a little bit from kindergarten (I would love to be a kindergarten ALT, it’d be so much fun!) so that was cool. But otherwise it was just a lot of vocab repeating today. The kids were very enthusiastic though.

1-2 in period 3 and they were a little quieter than 1-1, just generally speaking, but still pretty high energy. There were a few new siblings in this class who had exactly the same face as their older sibling, I didn't even have to think twice about who was whose sibling! Their homeroom teacher was 2-3’s one last year (the one who is good at English and really pushes her class in English) so she was pushing them pretty hard today as well. They really loved saying “I’M FINE” maybe because of the thumbs up action, and they also loved the candy game because playing paper scissors rock is always exciting for them. Lunch today was sushi rice mixed with egg and carrot and other veggies, soup, and this tofu ball thingy. There was so much food today that many of the kids (and me) had massive second helpings, but there was still food leftover! A lot of fun and random English conversations today, with one kid mistakenly calling me Mr. and himself Miss! 5th grade class was cancelled today because one of the teachers is away on a hike, and we want to keep the classes on the same page for ease of lesson planning. Some good news is that I finally finished transferring all the non-broken files to my hard drive and fixed it, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to recover all the files, so there’s maybe at least 25% lost permanently…anyway, got off work at 16:30.