Thursday, September 04, 2008

Funatsugawa Elementary 船津川小学校

Today I taught at Funatsugawa Elementary School. It is about a 20-30 minute bike ride South of where I live which is already kind of close to the southern outskirts of Sano. So I woke up real early so I could get there by 8:00am, but I biked too fast and ended up getting there at about 7:40. The woman that was there kept saying Hayai! which means early. I was like I know I misjudged how long it would take me.

I already knew the school was small, but I was surprised when I actually saw how small it was. Not in terms of size of the building, but it only has 21 students total, in the entire school! So in the morning they assembled upstairs and I did my Jiko shokai (self introduction) in front of all of them. They enjoyed it and again were surprised at the same stuff as the kids at other schools.

My average class size up to this point was 35. I taught four classes today, my first I had 8 students (1st and 2nd grade combined), next I taught 3rd/4th grade and it had only 4 students total! After that I taught 5th/6th grade and it had 9 students. So today I taught the entire school hahah. A kid in the 4th grade wanted me to draw him a picture of a naruto character so I asked him who was his favorite. He told me Sasuke, I said sure. Another kid asked if he could borrow my comics of Naruto but I was like I only have one.. haha. I'm not scheduled to be going back to Funatsugawa for another month so I have plenty of time to draw the picture haha.

At recess we played a schoolwide game of dodgeball it was alot of fun. After we played frisbee a little bit. They told me to please bring the frisbee back next time.

The class I had most fun in was probably surprisingly 5th/6th grade. It was funny because we played this taxi scenario game. I pretended to be a taxi driver because the students were learning: "Where do you want to go" "I want to go to _____". So I'd pretend to drive by they'd put their hand up and I'd say "Where do you want go?" Then they'd say for example "The beach". I took flash cards and posted them around the room of the locations then I'd drive around the room with them and drop them off at the place they wanted to go. It was funny, every once in a while I'd purposefully pass it and then be like wait a second and go Beep beep beep and back up.

Tomorrow I teach at a new school, Tenmyo Elementary 天明小学校. Luckily this one is closer haha.

1 comment:

Mandy said...

lol. That's so cute! Can I be in your class??

You're probably going to be their favorite teacher ever!