At Jikkoku Elementary
The sixth graders forgot about me. I was sitting in the teacher’s room waiting for them to get me and after seven minutes I finally asked, “Umm…Excuse me? Sixth grade? First period?” Turns out they were practicing for graduation and did not remember their English lesson. Luckily, the lesson was not too important so I just had them learn the flashcards and play bingo for the half hour that I taught them.
The third graders at Jikkoku Sho are too cute! If it were possible I would take the class home with me. They catch on to the sentences quickly and I am even able to get them to say the questions and answers with the correct rhythm and raise/fall. They had their first lesson with “Can you ~?” and they did an amazing job. The students understood all of the flashcards and when they did not know they worked together to figure it out. The “make a sandcastle” card is hard to figure out so is “draw a picture”.
The fourth graders also did “Can you ~?” and had it down perfectly. I was very impressed with how well they did. After class, I told them the next visit would be my last and they then decided it would be the prefect time for me to sign everything they owned. I had to sign pencil cases, notebooks, plastic boards, and scraps of paper. The highlight of the fourth grade class is when class is over and they fight over who carries my things back to the teacher’s room. I normally have five to six students dragging me down to the teacher’s room. That class loves English!
I ate lunch with the second graders and we played しりとり. If you were playing the game in English here is how it would work: the first person would say a word, “Black” the next person must say a word that starts with ‘k’, “Kite”, the third person would say “Elephant”, and so on. I have played this game before at the junior high school and we play it in English. However, I was playing with the second graders at elementary school so we played in Japanese. I am proud to say that I won the first game because everyone at the table was helping me but I was the first one out on the second game. I did last two rounds however!