This is my fourth time to Ishikawa ( the second this year) but my first to the Noto Peninsula, and it is nice to be back in the fresh air! I pretty much knew that today would go well as the teacher who had organised it was totally on the ball. Of course the real indicator is the Head Teacher’s greeting and he was a cool, if very talkative, guy! For the first two lessons I was asked to help out the CIR with two ichinensei classes. So for a cool set of people like today, no problem. And actually the CIR could handle things really well. She’d planned a great lesson. Theme = animals. Put the kids in a circle, play the Ball and Music Game, the kid with the ball comes to front. The teacher shows the kids an animal. The other kids shout “1,2,3 Go!” and the kid mimes the animals2l. The kids then have to guess what it is, in Japanese! Then the teacher teaches the word in English. Great stuff, no pre-teaching and the kids loved it. Then you put the cards in the middle of the circle and then pass around a ball ( or in this case it was a stuffed gorilla!) and two fly squatters. Then when you stop the music, the kids with the gorilla shouts out a word and the fly squatter kids have to hit the right card. Cool. We had two classes of that and the kids were great. They even wanted to play in the break time, so the gorilla got called in to service for the Koala Game. The CIR was great at the job, and it was even more impressive that it was her first year. Afterwards the Japanese teacher commented that it was great for her to see how we team taught the lesson, apparently she got some great ideas from the lesson we just did.

Then lunch and the show. Last week was 1,000 kids, and today was only 300. But what they lacked in numbers they sure made up in enthusiasm! It really helped that all the teachers were into it and even the 6th graders were mega genki. When I told them they lost the games, they twigged on to the “Try again!” thing really quickly and instead of just saying it en masse, one of the 6th graders actually stood up and organised them into a co-ordinated “Try again!” chant! Wow, these kids are full of confidence.

Then it was the teachers seminar, again great. The teachers had actually asked to have it extended so they could ask more questions, and they really got into it. They were still at the beginning level, but I tired to put some activities in with the theory and they loved it. Great. It was also good today that the school paid my travel expenses ( I don’t take a fee for visiting public schools, but these days have to ask for travel expenses), so unlike last week where the school suppliers paid the expenses, today I could just show the teachers how to use all the free stuff on the website.

So then another chat with the kouchou sensei, a trip to the onsen in my hotel and then out for dinner. Again that was great, with a cool sushi chef who had some great things to talk about. Eventhough I do school visits for free, it is nice to be paid in food!

Then at 9:30 we went off to the hotel bar and for some reason at 1:30 we were helping to tidy up and ended up doing the washing up!! But it was fun, and I’ve never been behind a bar before! So a great day’s work and a really cool night! You know, it’d be great to be an ALT in a town like this.