Ohisashiburi desu ne
Howdy folks!
....and now that I've got that out of my system (that is, the lingering tic that lodged itself in my person from the moment I set myself down before the Country Bear Jamboree show at Disney not 2 weeks past--thanks, Linda)...
Hello all, and long time no see
(LTNS being the meaning of "ohisashiburi desu ne"; the subject of this journal entry)
A great deal has happened, of course, since my last entry; just as a great deal happened since the subject of my last long entry actually took place--that being Halloween. Christmas has come and gone, along with New Years and the winter holiday generally speaking. ...In fact, it seems I start out way too many posts with "a great deal has happened since my last entry." I should just quit and jump into these bloggy posts without wasting the energy and time it takes to type up words that really serve no purpose but the translation of guilt for keeping you all in the dark, knowing you ALL HANG on my updates so desperately. ;)
We'll start with my Christmas lessons...and when I say "lessons," of course, you know by now that generally the only classes worth writing about are the elementary ones, and when I say "worth writing about," I, of course, say so because they are the only ones over which I weild any influence...furthermore, when I say "we'll start," I actually mean "I'll start" and rather "continue on" instead of start, since I actually "started" 3 paragraphs ago, despite the fact that I haven't actually managed to say much since.
(you can see I'm in a weird mood today ;)
Luckily, I'm at the point now where I can work out holiday lessons with decent success. Halloween had its blunder in Kanita, but Christmas went fairly smoothly. I did pretty much the same lesson for both elementary schools.
1) warm up game:
We do this at the start of every lesson (assuming, of course, that I managage to remember). After "HELLO!" and "HOW ARE YOU?" (and the inevitable reminder of what "how are you" means--that is, that the proper response for the question "how are you" is not "how are you" repeated back to the inquirer), I shout a stream of one-word commands at the class, and the students respond accordingly. Typically, the game goes like this:
Me: "Stand up!" (don't nit-pick--"stand up" is enough like a 1-word command that we'll count it as one. Same with the "sit down" we will see in the coming lines)
Students: *stand up*
Me: "Jump!"
Students: *jump*
Me: "Spin!"
Students: *spin*
Me: "Stand up!"
Students: *stop spinning and hold still*
Me: "Sit down!"
Students: *sit down*
Me: "Stand up!"
Students: *stand up*
Me: "Stand up!"
1/3 of Students: *sit back down*
1/3 of students: *freeze somewhere between sitting and standing, realizing that-*
final 1/3 of students: *proudly remain standing, for they are the 1/3 with the awesome knowledge that they are already standing*
2) Today's Lesson:
After the warm-up game, the kids sit back down and I introduce the topic of the day. In this case, Christmas. It's usually here, at the start of the lesson, that I tend to forget where I'm going between parts of my plan. As an English teacher, of course, this is perfectly fine, since the kids love nothing more than the jolly entertainment that is me scuttling back and forth in front of the blackboard for a few seconds trying to figure out where the hell I'm at.
Eventually, I get it, of course, and we set into "What do you know about [Christmas]?" Here the students shout out some odd terms or stories, until one student inevitably calls out something completely off-base that freezes the class and turns attention back on me so I can either confirm (rarely) or shake my head (comically, of course) before getting back on track. Example:
Me: "What do you know about Christmas?"
Student 1: "Santa!"
Student 2: "Candy!"
Student 3: "Illumination!" (the Japanese term for Christmas lights is actually "illumination")
Student 4: "Socks!"
Student 2: "Present!"
Student 3: "Snowman!"
Student 1: "Sori!" (sleigh)
Student 4: "Frog shoes!"
Students 1-3: ...
Aw. Poor student 4. Desperately he struggles to explain himself, but in his eyes you can see, even as he blabbers on, that he's not really that sure anymore that he's right about this one. Typically, here, I shrug and move on.
I wore a Santa hat that day, so we started with "Who am I today?" and worked our way through the Christmas vocab from there: Santa, christmas tree, christmas lights, candy cane, elf (no one, even among the teachers, had heard of Santa's elves), reindeer (similarly, no one knew Santa had NINE reindeer--most people though he had 1 or 2; I stopped here to tell them the reindeer story), present, star, christmas stocking (took some work to get the kids to understand the difference between a christmas stocking and socks), and snowman.
3) GAME:
After the vocab achieved a brain stickiness of about 3 post-its, we played a game to cement it in there. For the Christmas lesson, that game was pictionary.
For those of you who don't know pictionary (you sad, sad people), here's the idea:
The students are broken into teams. Each team is given a mini chalk board (or white board), a marker, and a rag/eraser with which to erase the board. One student is chosen from each team and sent into the hall with Mel-sensei (that being me), where I announce the secret word--one of the vocab terms they have just learned (ex: star). We then re-enter the room and the students take their ready-to-go stance before their boards. When I say "go!" the students feverishly draw the secret thing (a star, in this case), as his/her teammates shout out guesses for what it might be. When a team guesses correctly, the drawer runs back to me at the front of the room and says (properly, with decent pronunciation and proper grammar), "It's a star!" First student to say it right gets a point. Then the current drawers pick a new drawer and the whole thing starts over. Winning team gets a prize (like a pencil with English on it or a shiny American penny :)
All in all, huge success.
4) Song
We usually don't do many songs, but both schools actually ASKED me to do a song for the Christmas special, and when you're asked to do a Christmas song with limited-English kids in Japan, that inevitably leads to one song: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." This song is good because it's simple and repetitive. Also, the kids already know the tune, and very likely the words, so doing this song in class typically takes about 5 minutes for 3rd graders and up.
And it did. :)
5) Review and goodbye:
At the end of the lesson comes another vocab run-through, followed by a farewell, then the students all stand up and thank the teacher, bow, and are on their way
And that's typically how it works.
Here are some pics of my 3rd grade lesson at Tairadate Elementary:
http://pics.livejournal.com/tigsara03/gallery/0000q5zw
I've got shots from the other classes, too, but they're not uploaded yet, so...yea. Also, this gallery is made up of pics taken by a teacher observing the lesson, so you get some shots of me in action. ;D
Christmas is probably going to be my biggest lesson of the year every year. I was running around like crazy from about the end of November, making preparations, drawing up art to use, gathering props, etc. (yet ironically, the lesson plan itself I pretty much threw together on my way to class). The best part was probably that, while I was at school, for once it wasn't just 1 lesson + lunch with students + sitting around doing nothing in the office = Mel's day. My day at Kanita was busy as hell, setting up the room with Christmas lights, a cd player, an elaborate "Merry Christmas!" on the board written in chalk, and a unique desk arrangement.* After lessons (and the schools actually made an effort here to make it lessons), I was asked to help the students make Christmas cards--mostly help them with the English writing of "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Honestly, I have to say that one of the best parts of teaching is helping frustrated students be less frustrated. For the card-making class, I had a mix of every grade, and a much larger class than I was used to. So when I wrote out the words on the board, the majority of the kids got it, but a considerable lot of them needed some reassurance that they were doing it right afterward. One of my special students came to the class, too, and I sat with him for several minutes, working through each letter until we got him from a twisted frown to a proud grin. :)
*AT LAST I've found a plus to having NO help from the teachers at Kanita elem--that being they have no say over what rules I happen to break in the class (such as the seating arrangements that follow the kids around from room to room). When the students came into my class for the Christmas lesson and asked where to sit, my reply of "anywhere is fine" was met with a brief pause of disbelief before they leapt into action to sit near their friends for probably the first time EVER. (HAHAHA! I shall be the most popular teacher in the history of EVER! >:)
In Tairadate elementary, my first and second graders didn't follow the format everyone else did, because as you likely know by now, these are the students with the teachers that love special class projects. So we broke our Christmas lesson into two classes, the first of which was learning new vocab, the Rudolph story (which I'm told I do very well...not sure if that's true), the song (you guessed it) "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and, finally, origami stockings. Each student made one big stocking about half the size of a piece of paper and 3 little ones about the size of a thumb...say, about big enough to fit a single piece of candy in. The second class was the execution of the demonstration of our mad Christmas-spreading skillz. Oh, that's right. We went Christmas caroling. ;)
If you read the Halloween post, you know that we went from room to room in the school trick-or-treating and singing 10 Little Witches. Similar deal for Christmas, but the teachers and I decided that, since Halloween was all about receiving candy, we'd make Christmas the opposite and emphasize the giving of the season. So we went from room to room and sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" (a song which, by now, you might imagine I never need to hear again), then had the 1st/2nd graders distribute the mini-stockings (now each filled with a piece of candy) to the kids and teachers in the other grades. Upon returning to the 1st/2nd grade classroom, we all made Christmas cards. Then, after everyone went home that day, the 1st/2nd graders left their big stockings hanging outside their classrooms and received candy stuffing from Mel-Santa for their generosity to the other students. I haven't seen the kids since, but I hear they enjoyed the surprise.
The final note on special activities that took place for the Christmas season takes us, remarkably, to a junior high. Before I get to it, I must explain something...in the form of a short semi-rant.
The most popular Christmas song here in Japan is "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. A close second is Jimmy Eat World's "Last Christmas." ...No popular Christmas song should be sung by a guy with a professional name like "Jimmy Eat World." I decided. No. Also, that Mariah Carey song really isn't that great. BUT IT'S EVERYWHERE. And, like WWYaMC (which I refuse to write out anymore), I'm just damn sick of hearing it.
So some time back in...maybe early November, Tsuruya-sensei of Tairadate JH played the Mariah Carey one in class for the kids to sing along to (this was actually back before I knew how insanely, inexplicably popular it was, but no lie--it was ACTUALLY IN THE TEXT BOOK). Now usually, when Tsuruya -sensei does something (anything at all, really), it spurs a not even remotely text/curriculum-related discussion about...something. Hell, sometimes he'll drop a pen, and the next thing I know, we're talking about boxing. But in this case, we listened to the Mariah Carey song (that is, the students listened while Tsuruya-sensei and I silently karaoke'd), and afterward started talking about Christmas songs. Perhaps 10 minutes later, I volunteered to bring in a cd of Christmas songs to listen to.
The next week I was in Tairadate, I brought in my 16-song self-burned (courtesy of iTunes) Christmas cd, which included such traditional classics as The Little Drummer Boy, O Come All Ye Faithful, Carol of the Bells (mostly because sometimes it's fun to play something the kids have NO hope of following along to), as well as some more modern songs, such as Frosty the Snowman and, of course, Rudolph. So I came in boasting my cd and asked Tsuruya-sensei to pick out which song he would like to listen to at the start of class. Unable to decide, he asked how long it would take to listen to all the songs. Well, it was a 50-minute cd, so I replied it would take all class, sure that would throw him off the idea, as it would probably send He-sensei over in Kanita into convulsions (the thought of doing something fun for A WHOLE HOUR???!!!) Rather, Tsuruya-sensei merely nodded and said, "Ok. Today is English Music class."
My error was in failing to calculate Tsuruya-sensei's (and my own, I'll admit) tendency to MASSIVELY DIGRESS at EVERY opportunity. So what was to be one English Music class turned into...3. BUT. It was hugely successful. 3 reasons:
1) it was fun, and my first graders especially loved watching their team of teachers dancing about in front of the room
2) The Frosty the Snowman song + my spiel on it managed to coax out of my dull and silent 2nd graders the FIRST SPARK OF INTEREST I'VE SEEN IN THEM AT ALL EVER. And since, that class has been amazingly better. (not perfect, but better)
3) I found, unexpectedly, a song that's easy, internationalizing, and fun that is NOT WWYaMC. And that song, ladies and gentlemen, is Feliz Navidad. So not only did my kids learn some great holiday English (specifically "I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart), but SPANISH as well (Feliz Navidad, Prospero ano y felicidad), which is great for the internationalizing thing I promised to do in my JET interview. ;) Tsuruya-sensei loved this song. Seriously. LOVED it. Enough to sing out the English and Spanish loud and proud through the room. Enough to play the song EVERY DAY from the end of November until the winter break (sometimes more than once and sometimes more than twice). Enough to dance around the cd player with his hands in the air. Enough to actually start a conga line in class around the rows of desks, clapping his hands and twirling as he went.
So for any fellow ALTs that might read this...if you're looking for a Christmas song to do in your own junior high...Feliz Navidad is where it's at. I recommend the Celine Dion version. ^^
Or, if that doesn't suit you, especially in the case of JH 3rd graders, the Chipmunks Christmas song proved quite popular there. :)
Christmas was a jolly time all around. Though I was crazy-busy, I loved being crazy-busy because...well, I'm a work-a-holic and I hate being bored. I made Christmas reindeer cookies for my elementary teachers (chocolate chip cookies with M&Ms for the eyes and noses, broken pretzels for the antlers), gave candy canes to the Kanita JH ones, and ended up making devilled eggs (a guaranteed big hit among Japanese people...at least the way I make them ;) for the Tairadate JH senseis on account of my running out of time to make more cookies. In return, I received some student-made mochi (gooey, pounded rice-cakes), candy, and Christmas cards from Kanita elementary (turns out those cards I was helping the students make were mostly for me ^^ ). Two of the Tairadate JH teachers got me Christmas gifts, receiving candy canes in return, and upon my return from my winter holiday, I found a bunch of New Years cards from teachers and students waiting in my mailbox. Yay. ^^
Weeeeeeeeell....I think that's it for my Christmas classes. I'm in the Board of Education office this whole week...essentially with nothing to do, so there SHOULD be at least one more update this week...I can't imagine what I'd be doing otherwise. We'll see what new, exciting excuses I find to justify silence if we don't get another update, anyway. ^^
Before we close, some random notes:
Mel's book recommendation of the New Year (not a New Year book, but quite funny and definitely recommended to anyone who likes Dave Barry or has a cynical opinion of grammar): June Casagrande's "Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun & Spite"
Interesting Japanese Cultural Note (I'm thinking I might try to drop one of these in my posts regularly):
Japanese children, like American kids, are afraid of graveyards at night. This point sprung up when I was talking to some of my elementary students, and I thought it was interesting, especially since graveyards are really different here in Japan. Japanese people are cremated, so graveyards are a LOT smaller here, for one. For another, a family typically owns a spot in a graveyard that is used as their family space, and the ashes of the deceased (so I understand it) do not remain in that plot indefinitely. (no, I don't know what they do with them when they aren't at the grave, but I'm sure Wikipedia knows) So why are kids afraid of graveyards here if they aren't walking on bodies as they move through them? Well...one of the kids I was talking too seemed afraid of the prospect of running into monkeys at night, which would probably be quite the unpleasant surprise, I must admit. I'd guess spirits might have something to do with it, too, though. ^_^
....and now that I've got that out of my system (that is, the lingering tic that lodged itself in my person from the moment I set myself down before the Country Bear Jamboree show at Disney not 2 weeks past--thanks, Linda)...
Hello all, and long time no see
(LTNS being the meaning of "ohisashiburi desu ne"; the subject of this journal entry)
A great deal has happened, of course, since my last entry; just as a great deal happened since the subject of my last long entry actually took place--that being Halloween. Christmas has come and gone, along with New Years and the winter holiday generally speaking. ...In fact, it seems I start out way too many posts with "a great deal has happened since my last entry." I should just quit and jump into these bloggy posts without wasting the energy and time it takes to type up words that really serve no purpose but the translation of guilt for keeping you all in the dark, knowing you ALL HANG on my updates so desperately. ;)
We'll start with my Christmas lessons...and when I say "lessons," of course, you know by now that generally the only classes worth writing about are the elementary ones, and when I say "worth writing about," I, of course, say so because they are the only ones over which I weild any influence...furthermore, when I say "we'll start," I actually mean "I'll start" and rather "continue on" instead of start, since I actually "started" 3 paragraphs ago, despite the fact that I haven't actually managed to say much since.
(you can see I'm in a weird mood today ;)
Luckily, I'm at the point now where I can work out holiday lessons with decent success. Halloween had its blunder in Kanita, but Christmas went fairly smoothly. I did pretty much the same lesson for both elementary schools.
1) warm up game:
We do this at the start of every lesson (assuming, of course, that I managage to remember). After "HELLO!" and "HOW ARE YOU?" (and the inevitable reminder of what "how are you" means--that is, that the proper response for the question "how are you" is not "how are you" repeated back to the inquirer), I shout a stream of one-word commands at the class, and the students respond accordingly. Typically, the game goes like this:
Me: "Stand up!" (don't nit-pick--"stand up" is enough like a 1-word command that we'll count it as one. Same with the "sit down" we will see in the coming lines)
Students: *stand up*
Me: "Jump!"
Students: *jump*
Me: "Spin!"
Students: *spin*
Me: "Stand up!"
Students: *stop spinning and hold still*
Me: "Sit down!"
Students: *sit down*
Me: "Stand up!"
Students: *stand up*
Me: "Stand up!"
1/3 of Students: *sit back down*
1/3 of students: *freeze somewhere between sitting and standing, realizing that-*
final 1/3 of students: *proudly remain standing, for they are the 1/3 with the awesome knowledge that they are already standing*
2) Today's Lesson:
After the warm-up game, the kids sit back down and I introduce the topic of the day. In this case, Christmas. It's usually here, at the start of the lesson, that I tend to forget where I'm going between parts of my plan. As an English teacher, of course, this is perfectly fine, since the kids love nothing more than the jolly entertainment that is me scuttling back and forth in front of the blackboard for a few seconds trying to figure out where the hell I'm at.
Eventually, I get it, of course, and we set into "What do you know about [Christmas]?" Here the students shout out some odd terms or stories, until one student inevitably calls out something completely off-base that freezes the class and turns attention back on me so I can either confirm (rarely) or shake my head (comically, of course) before getting back on track. Example:
Me: "What do you know about Christmas?"
Student 1: "Santa!"
Student 2: "Candy!"
Student 3: "Illumination!" (the Japanese term for Christmas lights is actually "illumination")
Student 4: "Socks!"
Student 2: "Present!"
Student 3: "Snowman!"
Student 1: "Sori!" (sleigh)
Student 4: "Frog shoes!"
Students 1-3: ...
Aw. Poor student 4. Desperately he struggles to explain himself, but in his eyes you can see, even as he blabbers on, that he's not really that sure anymore that he's right about this one. Typically, here, I shrug and move on.
I wore a Santa hat that day, so we started with "Who am I today?" and worked our way through the Christmas vocab from there: Santa, christmas tree, christmas lights, candy cane, elf (no one, even among the teachers, had heard of Santa's elves), reindeer (similarly, no one knew Santa had NINE reindeer--most people though he had 1 or 2; I stopped here to tell them the reindeer story), present, star, christmas stocking (took some work to get the kids to understand the difference between a christmas stocking and socks), and snowman.
3) GAME:
After the vocab achieved a brain stickiness of about 3 post-its, we played a game to cement it in there. For the Christmas lesson, that game was pictionary.
For those of you who don't know pictionary (you sad, sad people), here's the idea:
The students are broken into teams. Each team is given a mini chalk board (or white board), a marker, and a rag/eraser with which to erase the board. One student is chosen from each team and sent into the hall with Mel-sensei (that being me), where I announce the secret word--one of the vocab terms they have just learned (ex: star). We then re-enter the room and the students take their ready-to-go stance before their boards. When I say "go!" the students feverishly draw the secret thing (a star, in this case), as his/her teammates shout out guesses for what it might be. When a team guesses correctly, the drawer runs back to me at the front of the room and says (properly, with decent pronunciation and proper grammar), "It's a star!" First student to say it right gets a point. Then the current drawers pick a new drawer and the whole thing starts over. Winning team gets a prize (like a pencil with English on it or a shiny American penny :)
All in all, huge success.
4) Song
We usually don't do many songs, but both schools actually ASKED me to do a song for the Christmas special, and when you're asked to do a Christmas song with limited-English kids in Japan, that inevitably leads to one song: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." This song is good because it's simple and repetitive. Also, the kids already know the tune, and very likely the words, so doing this song in class typically takes about 5 minutes for 3rd graders and up.
And it did. :)
5) Review and goodbye:
At the end of the lesson comes another vocab run-through, followed by a farewell, then the students all stand up and thank the teacher, bow, and are on their way
And that's typically how it works.
Here are some pics of my 3rd grade lesson at Tairadate Elementary:
http://pics.livejournal.com/tigsara03/gallery/0000q5zw
I've got shots from the other classes, too, but they're not uploaded yet, so...yea. Also, this gallery is made up of pics taken by a teacher observing the lesson, so you get some shots of me in action. ;D
Christmas is probably going to be my biggest lesson of the year every year. I was running around like crazy from about the end of November, making preparations, drawing up art to use, gathering props, etc. (yet ironically, the lesson plan itself I pretty much threw together on my way to class). The best part was probably that, while I was at school, for once it wasn't just 1 lesson + lunch with students + sitting around doing nothing in the office = Mel's day. My day at Kanita was busy as hell, setting up the room with Christmas lights, a cd player, an elaborate "Merry Christmas!" on the board written in chalk, and a unique desk arrangement.* After lessons (and the schools actually made an effort here to make it lessons), I was asked to help the students make Christmas cards--mostly help them with the English writing of "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Honestly, I have to say that one of the best parts of teaching is helping frustrated students be less frustrated. For the card-making class, I had a mix of every grade, and a much larger class than I was used to. So when I wrote out the words on the board, the majority of the kids got it, but a considerable lot of them needed some reassurance that they were doing it right afterward. One of my special students came to the class, too, and I sat with him for several minutes, working through each letter until we got him from a twisted frown to a proud grin. :)
*AT LAST I've found a plus to having NO help from the teachers at Kanita elem--that being they have no say over what rules I happen to break in the class (such as the seating arrangements that follow the kids around from room to room). When the students came into my class for the Christmas lesson and asked where to sit, my reply of "anywhere is fine" was met with a brief pause of disbelief before they leapt into action to sit near their friends for probably the first time EVER. (HAHAHA! I shall be the most popular teacher in the history of EVER! >:)
In Tairadate elementary, my first and second graders didn't follow the format everyone else did, because as you likely know by now, these are the students with the teachers that love special class projects. So we broke our Christmas lesson into two classes, the first of which was learning new vocab, the Rudolph story (which I'm told I do very well...not sure if that's true), the song (you guessed it) "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and, finally, origami stockings. Each student made one big stocking about half the size of a piece of paper and 3 little ones about the size of a thumb...say, about big enough to fit a single piece of candy in. The second class was the execution of the demonstration of our mad Christmas-spreading skillz. Oh, that's right. We went Christmas caroling. ;)
If you read the Halloween post, you know that we went from room to room in the school trick-or-treating and singing 10 Little Witches. Similar deal for Christmas, but the teachers and I decided that, since Halloween was all about receiving candy, we'd make Christmas the opposite and emphasize the giving of the season. So we went from room to room and sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" (a song which, by now, you might imagine I never need to hear again), then had the 1st/2nd graders distribute the mini-stockings (now each filled with a piece of candy) to the kids and teachers in the other grades. Upon returning to the 1st/2nd grade classroom, we all made Christmas cards. Then, after everyone went home that day, the 1st/2nd graders left their big stockings hanging outside their classrooms and received candy stuffing from Mel-Santa for their generosity to the other students. I haven't seen the kids since, but I hear they enjoyed the surprise.
The final note on special activities that took place for the Christmas season takes us, remarkably, to a junior high. Before I get to it, I must explain something...in the form of a short semi-rant.
The most popular Christmas song here in Japan is "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. A close second is Jimmy Eat World's "Last Christmas." ...No popular Christmas song should be sung by a guy with a professional name like "Jimmy Eat World." I decided. No. Also, that Mariah Carey song really isn't that great. BUT IT'S EVERYWHERE. And, like WWYaMC (which I refuse to write out anymore), I'm just damn sick of hearing it.
So some time back in...maybe early November, Tsuruya-sensei of Tairadate JH played the Mariah Carey one in class for the kids to sing along to (this was actually back before I knew how insanely, inexplicably popular it was, but no lie--it was ACTUALLY IN THE TEXT BOOK). Now usually, when Tsuruya -sensei does something (anything at all, really), it spurs a not even remotely text/curriculum-related discussion about...something. Hell, sometimes he'll drop a pen, and the next thing I know, we're talking about boxing. But in this case, we listened to the Mariah Carey song (that is, the students listened while Tsuruya-sensei and I silently karaoke'd), and afterward started talking about Christmas songs. Perhaps 10 minutes later, I volunteered to bring in a cd of Christmas songs to listen to.
The next week I was in Tairadate, I brought in my 16-song self-burned (courtesy of iTunes) Christmas cd, which included such traditional classics as The Little Drummer Boy, O Come All Ye Faithful, Carol of the Bells (mostly because sometimes it's fun to play something the kids have NO hope of following along to), as well as some more modern songs, such as Frosty the Snowman and, of course, Rudolph. So I came in boasting my cd and asked Tsuruya-sensei to pick out which song he would like to listen to at the start of class. Unable to decide, he asked how long it would take to listen to all the songs. Well, it was a 50-minute cd, so I replied it would take all class, sure that would throw him off the idea, as it would probably send He-sensei over in Kanita into convulsions (the thought of doing something fun for A WHOLE HOUR???!!!) Rather, Tsuruya-sensei merely nodded and said, "Ok. Today is English Music class."
My error was in failing to calculate Tsuruya-sensei's (and my own, I'll admit) tendency to MASSIVELY DIGRESS at EVERY opportunity. So what was to be one English Music class turned into...3. BUT. It was hugely successful. 3 reasons:
1) it was fun, and my first graders especially loved watching their team of teachers dancing about in front of the room
2) The Frosty the Snowman song + my spiel on it managed to coax out of my dull and silent 2nd graders the FIRST SPARK OF INTEREST I'VE SEEN IN THEM AT ALL EVER. And since, that class has been amazingly better. (not perfect, but better)
3) I found, unexpectedly, a song that's easy, internationalizing, and fun that is NOT WWYaMC. And that song, ladies and gentlemen, is Feliz Navidad. So not only did my kids learn some great holiday English (specifically "I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart), but SPANISH as well (Feliz Navidad, Prospero ano y felicidad), which is great for the internationalizing thing I promised to do in my JET interview. ;) Tsuruya-sensei loved this song. Seriously. LOVED it. Enough to sing out the English and Spanish loud and proud through the room. Enough to play the song EVERY DAY from the end of November until the winter break (sometimes more than once and sometimes more than twice). Enough to dance around the cd player with his hands in the air. Enough to actually start a conga line in class around the rows of desks, clapping his hands and twirling as he went.
So for any fellow ALTs that might read this...if you're looking for a Christmas song to do in your own junior high...Feliz Navidad is where it's at. I recommend the Celine Dion version. ^^
Or, if that doesn't suit you, especially in the case of JH 3rd graders, the Chipmunks Christmas song proved quite popular there. :)
Christmas was a jolly time all around. Though I was crazy-busy, I loved being crazy-busy because...well, I'm a work-a-holic and I hate being bored. I made Christmas reindeer cookies for my elementary teachers (chocolate chip cookies with M&Ms for the eyes and noses, broken pretzels for the antlers), gave candy canes to the Kanita JH ones, and ended up making devilled eggs (a guaranteed big hit among Japanese people...at least the way I make them ;) for the Tairadate JH senseis on account of my running out of time to make more cookies. In return, I received some student-made mochi (gooey, pounded rice-cakes), candy, and Christmas cards from Kanita elementary (turns out those cards I was helping the students make were mostly for me ^^ ). Two of the Tairadate JH teachers got me Christmas gifts, receiving candy canes in return, and upon my return from my winter holiday, I found a bunch of New Years cards from teachers and students waiting in my mailbox. Yay. ^^
Weeeeeeeeell....I think that's it for my Christmas classes. I'm in the Board of Education office this whole week...essentially with nothing to do, so there SHOULD be at least one more update this week...I can't imagine what I'd be doing otherwise. We'll see what new, exciting excuses I find to justify silence if we don't get another update, anyway. ^^
Before we close, some random notes:
Mel's book recommendation of the New Year (not a New Year book, but quite funny and definitely recommended to anyone who likes Dave Barry or has a cynical opinion of grammar): June Casagrande's "Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun & Spite"
Interesting Japanese Cultural Note (I'm thinking I might try to drop one of these in my posts regularly):
Japanese children, like American kids, are afraid of graveyards at night. This point sprung up when I was talking to some of my elementary students, and I thought it was interesting, especially since graveyards are really different here in Japan. Japanese people are cremated, so graveyards are a LOT smaller here, for one. For another, a family typically owns a spot in a graveyard that is used as their family space, and the ashes of the deceased (so I understand it) do not remain in that plot indefinitely. (no, I don't know what they do with them when they aren't at the grave, but I'm sure Wikipedia knows) So why are kids afraid of graveyards here if they aren't walking on bodies as they move through them? Well...one of the kids I was talking too seemed afraid of the prospect of running into monkeys at night, which would probably be quite the unpleasant surprise, I must admit. I'd guess spirits might have something to do with it, too, though. ^_^