Got picked up at 10 this morning and off to today’s school. The teacher here had seen my presentation for the Okayama City BOE in Summer so invited me to the school to give the teachers a hand in setting up their own programme. Up until now they’ve had an ALT once a week, but from now on they have to teach on their own. The show wasn’t till the afternoon, so in the morning I had chance to set up and also to check the DVD as luckily this was the first school I’ve seen with a DVD player. They were also looking at making their own DVD resources, which was quite interesting. Anyway the show was great, the kids were fantastic. They were really loud when they should be, and really quiet when I was talking so my voice held out OK. Then a 2 hour teaching seminar and the teachers were great. The usual questions came up (pronunciation and 6th graders) but they were also looking for some warm up games and motivation/control techniques for first graders. I also spent a fair bit of time going through the International Exchange projects which they seemed to like and also showed them the Christmas page with the musical scores from different countries. As expected they all went “ehhhhh” at the Arabic one! I also got a phone call part way through, one of the teachers answered for me and I don’t know who was more surprised, the school that I got a call from a big Tokyo bookstore, or the bookstore because I was doing volunteer work in an elementary school. So I finished at 5, very, very tired but after such a good day, it was a “good job well done” tired. This week I’ve been from Kyushu to Tokyo, to Mt Fuji, Tochigi, Okayama and now I’m back to Kyushu. It’s been hard, but having such responsive teachers who really care and really want to learn certainly makes it all worthwhile.