School week, movie, bike ride

Hello!

School started back up this past week.

I mentioned last time that students came for a few half days (Friday, Monday, Tuesday) to ease into going back to school and then they had the day off on Wednesday. On Thursday was our school's "opening ceremony," after which there were a few classes.

Friday was a normal school day and I had my first English classes with the 5th grade students.

The 5th graders started a new unit - in this unit, they learn how to say things like "I get up at 7:00 o'clock" and also get familiar with the terms always, sometimes or never.

I have not yet done a 6th grade lesson yet, but I think they start with learning how to talk about their summer vacation, studying phrases like "I went to" and "It was fun" or "it was exciting" etc.

For most classes, the teachers ask me to talk to the students about my summer vacation, so I tell them about going back to America and then talking about some of the things I did in Japan after my America trip.

I had my last day at my "visit" school on Monday - this is the school that I go to once a week. On that day, we did an English class with all of the 6th grade students (4 classes of students).

The teacher asked me to prepare some games for them to play during the class period. We did "alphabet bingo" which is just I spin a wheel with 26 different vocabulary words on it. Each vocabulary starts with a different letter of the alphabet.

Beforehand, the students fill out a bingo card, filling 16 spaces with one letter from the alphabet. If the wheel spin lands on a word that starts with a letter on their card, they can circle that space and then write the word in the space below the bingo card.

We then played a traditional Japanese game called "fruit basket." This is kind of like musical chairs but all of the students arrange their chairs in a circle with one person in the middle of the circle.

Each student is assigned one of four fruits. The student in the middle can call a fruit or can say something that applies to certain students (like "boy" or "someone with long hair") - if any of the sitting students were either assigned that fruit or meet the criteria stated by the person in the middle, those students have to stand up and switch chairs.

The person who does not find a chair to sit in is the new person in the middle and has to say a category in English (like the ones mentioned above - either a fruit or some personal attribute - and the game continues).

The teachers had a few gifts for me when I left, and they saw me to the door.

The rest of the week went well at my other school, which will from now on be the only school that I go to on a daily basis.

One interesting thing that happened was that the assistant principal and teachers seem to be rather precise about the timing of things. For instance, on Thursday, we had the opening ceremony and students went home around 11:30 a.m.

There was no school lunch prepared for that day, so all teachers either had to eat what they brought from home or go to a nearby store to buy food. Before the lunch break started, though, the assistant principal specifically stated that lunch would start at 1:10 p.m. and last for one hour.

I thought it was interesting that he was specific about this - I think in America we might not be so precise in announcing the lunch start and end time for the teachers.

On Saturday, I saw the new "Top Gun" movie. The movie theaters here play the movie in English with Japanese subtitles.

The experience at the theater was mostly the same as what one would find in America. The one interesting part, though, was that everyone in the theater stayed through the end of the ending credits. The lights in the theater did not even come up until after the credits were done, and no one moved until it was finished.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride out from Kobe into some of the surrounding country side - it was not too far from home before I started to get into the surrounding rice fields. I have included some pictures from the ride below.

Until next time,

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Photos from this week!

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