Thursday

Woke up at 7:15am, had noodles for breakfast, and then set off for school. Back to beautiful sunny weather today. Spent the first two spare periods making a lot of materials for next week’s lessons. Actually managing to keep myself pretty busy with making new worksheets and thinking of more fun stuff to do in lessons. Had class with 3-1 in period 3, and it was a pretty good lesson considering I didn't get to have meetings with the 3rd grade teachers about today’s lesson, so I literally just walked in 5 minutes before class and was able to quickly brief them on what we’re doing today. Thankfully the ex-2nd graders are still just as good, they weren’t being difficult or anything. They all cheered when I announced we were going to play bingo today, and also the way they copied me very seriously when I was teaching them the difference between pronouncing 13 and 30 was very cute. 3-2 was also pretty good, considering I did the whole lesson on my own since their homeroom teacher is new to this school and doesn't know how I do things, and unfortunately we weren’t able to have a meeting before today either. She was really great with letting me just do everything by myself though, and also helping to discipline the kids too. I like her the most out of the new teachers because she’s the most approachable and also proactive. She came up to me later during the day and thanked me for the English lesson, and also asked if we could do meetings, to which I replied that yes I would love English lesson meetings please!!! I also said that I was super sorry we didn't have a meeting before today’s lesson but she was totally ok with it, and agreed that we should have meetings beforehand (the 3-1 teacher is quite passive about English so it’s a bit hard to bring up the topic of having meetings with him).

Lunch today was bread with plum jam (of which there was a lot of leftovers, the teachers were all comparing whose class had the most leftovers back in the staffroom haha), udon, and salad. Talked with a few of the girls today who told me about their flute lessons and boy scouts (they don’t have girl scouts over here so both boys and girls can do boy scouts!). Towards the end of lunch the funny kid struck up another English conversation with me (with the surrounding kids listening in again) about raw eggs (about how other countries don’t really eat raw eggs on rice like Japan does), about how he’s a super hero that can fly (he jumped adorably), has super strength (gently punched his pencil case) and can’t die (poked his scissors gently in him and said “I’m OK!”). He is so hilarious, I’m so glad he’s in this school to liven up the atmosphere. Cleaning time was a breeze again.

6-2 and period 5, and it was a super great lesson. They did the greetings super loudly, have gotten so used to the “Small Talk” section now that they’re repeating back sentences and not just words, and just putting up their hands super fast for absolutely every question that I ask. They did the worksheet activity I planned perfectly, and were all working really hard writing all the capital-letter words into lowercase letters. My JTE and I both walked out just wondering what had happened to last year’s rowdy 5th graders, and just really happy that we’re having such good English lessons with them this year. A lot of the teachers had to leave then for some business meetings outside of school (which is why we had the special early school schedule today) so the staffroom was very empty. Thankfully 5-2’s homeroom teacher was still around so I could quickly have a meeting with her about tomorrow’s lesson. Spent the rest of the spare time finishing off some crossword worksheets for 6th graders, and making food flash cards for 4th grade. Got off work on time today at 16:00 and popped by Daiso to get some zip-lock bags to store the food flash cards in.