Friday

Woke up super late at 7:30am (overslept my alarm!!!) and rushed to school. Still had time to throw out the rubbish and grab some breakfast from the convenience store though! Spent the morning burning some song videos to a DVD for English broadcast. The TV is super old so it doesn't have an HDMI port to connect laptops to, and I don't have the cable to connect my laptop to this kind of TV, so I have to go the DVD way. Thankfully the music teacher who’s in charge of broadcasts said that I can use as many DVDs as I like. Had class with 6-1 in period 1, and it was a great lesson. Because we were just playing games, all the kids were involved, including the ones who usually don’t participate at all. But with the game format, even they were properly asking “Do you have a ___?” and going “YAAAY” when they won and “OH NO” when they didn’t. Games actually work really well with 6-1, because they’re the quieter class so I can actually get through explaining the rules without much trouble (unlike 6-2 where I sometimes have to keep stopping, and telling specific kids to be quiet).

Next up was 5-2 in period 2 and it was another great lesson. They got the small talk section down (not as good as the 6th graders yet, but they’re getting there!) and were able to do the listening activity well, even though it was pretty hard (fast speed and quite a lot of words). Then we did the speaking activity where they had to ask each other “What do you want?” and note down what others said. Then we did some writing practice with them writing their own names. We didn’t manage to get onto the passport activity (writing their names and drawing their pictures on a passport template) as we ran out of time. 5-1 in period 3 and it was also a good lesson, but this class really struggled with the listening activity so we didn’t have time to even go onto the writing activity. Listening to the video wasn’t enough for the kids, so their homeroom teacher and I did a slow version for them by simplifying it down majorly. So if the video had a bunch of stuff like “I like blue. Do you like blue? What colour do you like?” we’d just simplify it to me asking directly “What do you like?” to the homeroom teacher, and him answering “I like blue.” to help the kids know what the answer was. It was a little surprising though, because 5-2 was able to do it without the slow version so yea.

Lunch today was fried fish fritter (it’s the fish with the eggs still inside, but the way that our school’s lunch team cooks it makes it really delicious, so I don't mind the taste/texture, but I’ve heard some other ALTs really struggling with this particular fish because of the eggs inside), seaweed rice, salad, and egg soup. The servings were really huge today since there were quite a few teachers away. For the broadcast we did the usual 3 vocab thing, and then we played the DVD of the Youtube videos I burned on there this morning. It’s so relaxing to just use DVDs for the broadcast, I’m going to find a ton of Youtube videos and just do that for the rest of the year! Cleaning time was a breeze again, I swear this group of kids are just the sweetest bunch ever. Kids really feed off each other’s energies though, when the group has a majority of sweet kids, the rest (who might usually not be so obedient) follow suit. Spent the rest of the afternoon making worksheets and prepping for next week’s lessons. Got off work at 16:00 and popped by Daiso to get a bicycle pump and some notebooks. I wanted to ride my bicycle downtown yesterday instead of driving but the tires were super flat since I haven’t ridden my bicycle at all since getting my car, so probably since last year October sometime! The notebooks are for my Japanese study since I’ve signed up to do the JLPT N2 in July.