My First Day Teaching at ES

My desk at ES. On the left are gifts from 1st graders.

When I arrived at school this morning, Kocho-sensei greeted me with a look of confusion and then started talking about which days I was supposed to be there, which in turn confused me and I had a minor moment of panic where I thought I had messed up. Turns out Kocho-sensei thought I came on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, instead of Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I had some free time in the teacher's room until my class at third period. I spent the time printing out and binding copies of the lesson plans in English - very useful!

My class was at 10:40 with 6-1. I started with my self introduction powerpoint presentation. The kids were really responsive and loved the short video I showed. Interestingly when I show the video the kids always point out the northern lights ("aura").

After that all the kids did self introductions for me. They were really good - I was so pleased!

Next I got my first taste of actually teaching. The JTE and I taught the kids some vocabulary for directions and buildings. Next we played a game called ohajiki. Basically, its like bingo, but the students picked 5 buildings from a diagram of 13. I called out the vocabulary words one by one and the first to get all 5 picks called wins! They loved it!

Classes are shorter at ES, so that was all we had time for. I hung out in the teacher's room for a bit until it was lunch time. Then I went back to 6-1 and ate lunch in their classroom. It was curry rice! And an omelette with tomato sauce inside, and a vegetable salad with creepy little fish in it. And milk.

The kids invited me to play with them, as after lunch they have 1 hour of free time. I went out and they tried to explain the rules of their game, but then the kids sort of wandered off and I was attacked by a bunch of cute little first graders. They came up and grabbed my hand, saying, "isshou ni asobu?" (shall we play together?) in the cutest way, so I said sure! I played a bunch of games with them; I had no clue what was going on, but man, those kids tired me out! We were running all around outside the school for the entire hour, including up and down the stairs of their mountain-side garden several times. Finally the bell rang and I was free! I collapsed into my chair in the teacher's room, sweating profusely.

A little later, K-sensei took me on a little tour of the school. She showed me the English books in the library. The kids have mandatory 10 minutes of reading every morning before school, so each day I go and read to a different class.

Around 3pm I saw a bunch of 1st graders leaving, so I wandered out to the hallway to wave them off. A bunch of them came up to me to say goodbye. They really liked the braids in my hair - one girl asked if I did it myself, hehe. The first graders are really the cutest, I wish I got to teach them too!