Tuesday 10/06/06
Prac Block Day Twenty One

After the long weekend, it was strange to go back to school on the Tuesday. What made it stranger was the fact that my supervising teacher was away and I had classes all by myself! Of course at the end of the day – I was told I shouldn’t have taken classes with out a supervising teacher, but considering they didn't give me one – I fail to see where that’s my fault.

Anyway, I was supposed to be taking the class this morning on pets, so I did just that! The students dribbled in but were fairly ready to work. We started by reading all the pet names in hiragana. It was pretty good – they did better than I expected although there were a few people who didn’t even try. After this I told stories about pets in Japan and then introduced them into asking weather or not people had pets.

The game of bingo that I had the students do was where they had to walk around the classroom asking their classmates if they had the same animals. It worked really well because the students were up and moving and because we had practiced the sentence structure, they were confidante to ask their classmates.

After this I had 15 mins to spare, so I let the students choose from three activities and then monitored their work. At the end of the class, I did a quick run down on counters for animals which is something we will do next lesson. In hindsight I could have introduced the counters earlier and had the students integrate them into their sentences, but at the time I felt like they needed a break.

All in all it was a good lesson – one which I will repeat tomorrow with the beginners class. Hooray!

After this I went down to maths with D1 and then after lunch D2. I got the students organised on their work, collected old work and answered questions on the new work – I’m feeling like an almost accomplished maths teacher :P I also used the 3, 2, 1 rule for the first time!! Scary but fun! The students really do respond well to it because it is so basic and they are very used to it.

After lunch I had a spare and since sport was cancelled and all I’d be doing in any other boat would be drifting around be unhelpful, I decided to stay in the room and do some work. I did. ☺ I marked the maths stuff, I reflected on my Japanese lesson and then I prepared for my music lesson tomorrow.

Then I went out and did bus duty. All by myself.

I feel very much like a teacher today – because that’s what I did.