Day 133: Hai Sensei

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Have I told you how much I love being a kindergarten teacher? I'm not sure I've mentioned it, so let me state for the record, I absolutely love it. I think I'm pretty good at it too, my students seem to like me, although I get the feeling that most of my afternoon students think I'm a little bit mad for my tendancy to juggle plastic fruit or sit for 10 minutes explaining the difference between "My name is" and "I name is" with a stuffed octopus on my head.

I have two different tyes of classes, which are simply classified Mornings and Afternoons. The classes are held all over Saitama, so in a week I usually go to 7 different kindergartens, usually with the same assistant.

The morning classes go for 20 minutes (I usually do 5 - 6 classes back to back), usually with about 30 students aged from 3 - 5 years old and always follow the same pattern;

Hello song
Set Questions (What's your name? Where do you live?)
Alphabet
Numbers
Vocab
Song
Game
Good bye song

and usually involves lots of actions to describe the vocab and on my part, lots of jumping and running on the spot for 2 reasons;

1) They love it
2) It tires the little buggers out


My Afternoon classes are a bit different, whereas in the Morning classes my Japanese assistant translates everything I say, in the afternoon classes they generally sit in the corner doing paperwork while I get on with things however I see fit. The classes are anywhere from 2 - 15 students, and the age group can be anywhere from 3 - 9 years old and each lesson goes for 50 minutes.

The morning classes are infintely easier, but I like being able to get to know the students better, which is of course, what happens in the afternoon classes. My classes are so varied, I have some really great classes where the kids really want to be there, and love the lesson, the games, and pretty much everything I do. My Thursday class however sucks. I'm constantly having to shout at them and run after them outside and pick them up to drag them back into the classroom, there's one little girl who always cries and although we've been doing colours for like, a month they still only know Pink and Orange, which is nice, but not really hard considering the Japanese for Pink is Pinko and the Japanese for Orange is Orange.

All in all though, I really, really love my job, and feel really lucky to have the opportunity to do it. I wasn't able to take any photos till last Friday, as I'm pretty sure it's kind of frowned upon, but my Friday assistant is cool and got snap happy while I was doing my thing.

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