Well, half week actually, since my first day was Wednesday.

Wednesday is the day I go to the kindergarden in the morning. The other two schools I’d actually talked a little about what I should do for my first day (mainly self introduction), but that wasn’t the case with the kindergarden. I was a little uncertain how things would go, especially since the teachers there don’t speak that much English and none of the books I have really cover kindergarden activities. Given that, I guess it didn’t go too badly. I had three classes that I visited, ranging in age from about 3 years to 5 years. They mostly wanted to climb all over me. Main activity was “What is your name?”, which gets lots of play on the kids shows here. With the older kids I was able to ask, with coaching from their teacher, simple things like “What is your favorite color?” and have them answer in English. Pretty good. A lot more kids liked orange and purple than I would have expected.

After the third class, I had lunch with one of the classes. Have to remember to bring my rice or bread next time. Fortunately for me its only a half day, I was rather tired afterwards. I made a brief trip to Hiroshima, then returned in time for my elementary/kindergarden welcoming party. The group of teachers was pretty good and we had a fun time. Discovered that one of the kindergarden teachers had seen me at the Miyajima fireworks and had also gone to Setstock. I’m beginning to think I could go to Hokkaido or Okinawa and still have locals sighting me…

I’d crashed after the party, but woke up early the next morning and finished preparing for my first middle school class. The middle school has a total of 5 classes: one first year (7th grade), and two each for second & third (8th & 9th). Thursday I only had one class, one of the two 3rd year classes. I talked with their English teacher about some of the things I had planned, seemed she like most of them but thought the Bingo I had set up would be better for the first year class. She had another bingo version that was more question oriented that we used. I was just a little nervous, but by and large things went fine.

After the usual Japanese class opening of bows and greetings, she had the students introduce themselves. They had written down previously a basic “My name is…” plus a few more sentences about their interests. Went pretty well except for one boy that had troubles. Amazing how loud cicadas can be in an otherwise painful silence.

After that I did my self introduction, showing pictures of me, my family, Arizona and stuff. Tried to draw a connection between the roadrunner & coyote of Arizona & the old cartoons. I also tried to represent some of the Native American ideas with a Navaho sand painting and the rain stick I brought along (the rain stick was very popular with the teachers, they all wanted to know how it worked). Wore my scorpion bolo-tie to show off my most hated Arizona creature. Kids loved it. Other things I did was demonstrate with a tape measure the difference in rainfall between Arizona and Hiroshima (30 cm vs 150 cm) and the difference in temperature (the kids were wowed by the 45 degrees C Arizona can get in the summer). Also passed around a bit of petrified wood. Stuff like that.

The bingo game involved eight questions, each of which the students assigned to a square in a 3×3 grid (minus the center free square). Questions were things like “How old is he?” and “Where did he travel on summer vacation?” along with the answer. I wrote the questions on the board and the teacher went over how to change them to ones they could ask me (”How old are you?”, “Where did you travel…?”) as the grammar point. Then I randomly drew student numbers and the student would ask me the question and anyone who got it right got to cross off the box they put it in. Each time someone got a bingo, I gave them a penguin sticker (since I like penguins).
After that, they asked a few questions and then went through the usual saying goodbye and bowing.

This was third period, after which the entire school had a practice for the annual sports day, which is happening Sunday (when I may be hiking Mt. Fuji if the latest typhoon doesn’t cancel the trip — wish I could do both). I’d worn my dress clothes, so I wasn’t ready to join in with the other teachers in the relay race, but they got me to try the local traditional dance. I wasn’t very good at it… Otherwise I watched them practice. Most notable thing was that all the events were team oriented, instead of individual ones like is typical in the US. They had the biggest tug-o-war I have ever seen, the entire school of 130 split into two teams!

Marching and group gymnastics (like cheerleader style pyramid building) were the other major component. I had a very odd feeling watching them march after having so recently read at the Peace Memorial Museum about how Japanese schools had been turned into training camps for child soldiers during WWII. It was a little like an eery and sadly unnerving historic echo set to JPOP music. But it is amazing what the groups could do, far better than I remember my fellow students being at group activities like these. Oh, the other impressive one was a whole class jump rope game — yes, about 25 kids jumping a single rope in unison. The groups missed occasionally, but I was astounded how well they did do.

Today I had two classes, the other third year and one of the first years. The third year one went about the same as yesterday, the second was a little harder since I had to try to be easier in my speaking. Also the bingo I had made up (with words from my introduction, in English & Japanese) was a little too large (5×5 grid) since it took them a long time to fill it out. Have to make a smaller one next time. But it did mean that we went through a lot of penguin stickers because of all the bingo possibilities. They scored their cards as I gave my introduction, so there were quite a few breaks in class as I gave out stickers. May have to do that differently too next time. Afterwards, there was a little time for them to ask me questions.

Otherwise, I was able to get my computer online here in the teachers’ room with a bit of help from the vice principal and the science teacher. So I can do stuff online while at school. This afternoon is more sports day practice, I actually brought a change of clothes so I’ll have to see if I can show up the other teachers in running (or fall flat on my back, most of them are probably in better shape even if I do have longer legs…).

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