So here it is.

Yesterday, I was teaching a phonics class. The kids in the class are between six and eight. One boy, we’ll call him N, is half Japanese and half American.

So there we were playing a game where I hold up a grapheme and they need to give me words that begin with the corresponding sound. For example, if I held up the card that read ‘T t’ they would say, “tiger! ten! two! tent! tree!”.

We were going through a deck of flashcards and came to ‘B b’.

Naturally, I hear, “bird! boy! box! big!” and all of a sudden I hear N going, “bitch!”

I thought maybe I had heard incorrectly (all the kids were yelling) so I said, “N, what did you say?” And again, loudly and proudly, he yells “BITCH!”.

I was definitely surprised. I told him that he was right, that IS a /b/ word, but that it wasn’t a nice one to say. Honestly, I think he had no idea what it actually meant, but wow, did NOT see that one coming!

So, for example, if they say something like tento, for tent, we’ll get them to say it again and drop the ‘o’ on the end.
Most of them understand that it’s incorrect pronunciation and can fix it in a try or two.

One of the lessons we were doing included learning a set of new vocabulary that focused on words that have an o followed by a silent e (which makes ‘o’ say it’s name, instead of sounding like it does at the beginning of the word octopus). For example, bone. The level that we teach this at usually has kids from 8 – 11 years old.

We had already read the new vocabulary words that we were learning, and were going through the visuals one more time to check comprehension and pronunciation. When we came to ‘slope’, a lot of the kids were saying, ‘slo-pu’! So naturally, trying to point out this mistake I said, ‘SLO-POO?’ putting emphasis on the ‘oo’ at the end.

As soon as it had come out, Angi (who was observing that day) and I burst into fits of incontrollable laughter. Then to make matters worse, Angi adds, “constipation?!”. The poor kids didn’t get it and were severely confused about what was going on with the two teachers in the room. A couple of them even asked what we were laughing at or why, but really, that’s just one that doesn’t need to be explained from me, haha.

So now every time we’re doing our ‘magic e’ vocabulary and I come across ‘slope’, I can’t help but smile.

For the past week, I’ve been sick and slowly recovering. Not super sick or anything like that, but a really sore throat and of course, super lack of energy. I haven’t been coughing too much, but last week my voice was strained at best. Teaching all day doesn’t exactly help improve that condition, but after a good weekend of R&R I’ve been feeling much better and a lot less scratchy.

My students are cute, as always.
Last week, since I obviously wasn’t 100% and sounded like an old man, I had a couple kids who were extra sweet. Aside from almost everyone understanding that they needed to tone it down a little bit, I had Ikkun (which is what we’ll just call him to avoid being creepy and using names) act as my side kick. The other kids in the class (it’s a young class; four and five year olds) were a little rowdy. So, he would be the enforcer, and tell them to sit down, be quiet and do the activities properly, haha.

The following class (which is older kids; mostly 7 – 9), my voice was even more hoarse, from trying to get my younger ones to listen. I guess it sounded pretty bad, so KG told me that I should go take a sip of the drink I had on my desk.

Along with having sweet students, my friends (and co-workers) Angi and Meg were awesome.
Aside from getting me all drugged up (on medicine) they got me a care package from the import store — good old fashioned Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, saltine crackers and some cough drops. They also helped me on my search to find the Valentine’s Day present that I wanted to give.

So despite feeling like poop last week, everyone really helped me get better, which I really am grateful for.
And here I am.

Feeling better.
So for lack of a better word, w00t!

I had this really long explanation written out, but then I decided it was too intense…

So basically, we have two levels of phonics classes (along with our other levels of ‘regular’ classes). These phonics classes obviously have a greater focus on phonics, even though the majority of our children’s classes classes do have a phonics component. For the phonics classes, we work with a specific sound each week. You’ve got the phoneme with its corresponding digraph, plus a few vocabulary words that begin with that sound.

Obviously some phonemes are easier to find vocabulary words for than others.

So let’s cut back to two weeks ago, when in the class that’s mostly 6 – 8 year olds, we were working with ‘Q’ (/kw/).
For the vocabulary, we want to use words that are tangible, right? For each vocabulary word, we also have a flashcard (therefore using abstract concepts makes it even more difficult… not only from a comprehension standpoint, but for the flashcard creation as well, haha).

The only problem is, really, how many good words begin with ‘Q’ (and are reasonably phonetically regular)?

I forget all the words on the list, but the main anchor image is ‘queen’. We might have had ‘quiz’ in there…

But anyways, one of the words was ‘quail’.
Oh yes, that delicious bird.
Here’s a photo of a quail… they’re actually kind of cute.

A lot of the kids knew it was a bird, but didn’t believe me when I told them it was delicious and tasted like chicken, haha. At first, they had a really hard time remembering it… but then it got to the point where for no reason at all, they would just yell QUAIL. No matter what image came up, they’d first say ‘QUAIL!’.

So last week, we moved on to ‘R’ (/ɹ̠/). We were doing the flashcards thing for the new vocabulary… so slowly, I reveal one flashcard at a time. They know a good majority of the vocabulary, so they try to guess what it is as it comes up.

Wouldn’t you know, everything was ‘QUAIL’!!

I’ve never heard quail shouted so many times in my life, haha. It’s pretty cute and funny though.
Even after I said, No! No quail!
They kept on going, QUAIL!!
And of course broke out into fits of giggles.
Which naturally, is contagious.

She’s a really cute girl. One day she was singing 「さくらんぼ」 and because it was super popular when I was in university here (and because barby played a cover of it at their oneman) I know it quite well.

So I sang along with her.
She was really surprised. WHY DO YOU KNOW THIS SONG!?

Haha. Cute.

No reason for it really, I’ve just been busy or too tired to do so.

It feels like S-T is kind of exploding now, but in a good way. We’re getting a lot of opportunities that we didn’t get before, and it seems like things are in general, really changing for the better! I’m really proud of the site and the work that everyone has put into it, so I hope it can keep going the way it is.

In other news… we had a Halloween Event at school on November 1st, which was a lot of fun. Eri, Sean and myself all had a room to man, so I did a mystery box game where kids had to stick their hands inside a box without knowing what it was. I had Jell-O (green, too), wet, balled up newspaper, rice that was soaking in water, and cucumbers. I also borrowed a pumpkin costume from Eri, because we decided that suited me better than Cookie Monster, haha.

The event was a lot of fun, so of course now I’m totally looking forward to the Christmas event! Santa’s even coming.

Classes are going well. I really enjoy all my students, and even the ones who were giving me a few problems before, are getting better. For the most part, the troublesome kids aren’t ‘bad’ because they have a desire to be bad… a few of them have some issues.

On Thursday, Kuu-chan (one of my four year olds) got angry at me (not actually angry). She had made a cone out of origami paper. I asked her if it was ice cream, and she said yes. Since there was no ‘ice cream’ in it, I balled up a piece of scrap paper and tossed it in. She looked at it for a minute, then took it out, and told me it couldn’t go in there because it wasn’t origami. I told her it was. Then she said it wasn’t origami paper, so it wasn’t origami, hahaha.

After that, she asked for more sheets (only brown), crumpled them up and made chocolate ice cream in her cone. She’s seriously the cutest kid. Although I say that about almost all of them… haha.

I have another student, we’ll call her M, who insists on drawing afros on everything when we’re doing our colouring worksheet. Well, everything meaning everything of mine. Usually there’s only two kids in that class, M and R (who is a boy). When M starts drawing afros, R will go “NO THANK YOU! NO AFRO THANK YOU!”.

I LOVE IT. Haha. I asked her why she likes afros so much, but she’s not really sure. They also tried to make my hair into an afro one day… that didn’t work out so well.

That’s one thing you gotta love about working with people, especially kids… no day is ever the same.

Although that said, I love my adult classes too. They’re like, the nicest people ever, and they’re so much fun. Sometimes I wish I had a recorder or a video tape in that class.

I do have to say that I feel really grateful and lucky that I got this job. The students are great, and my co-workers and boss are awesome. In a way, it feels kind of like the campground, minus all the stupidity. But it’s that kind of atmosphere that because you really enjoy it, you want to work hard to make everyone happy and to make it the best it can be.

And although that sounds corny, that’s how it is.

It’s pretty cute though.
And the boy who told us, is hilarious. He stays like half an hour after class is over, just to hang out and talk, haha.

There’s another another boy, who has a crush on one of the girls in his class. One day she came in saying how she had a date, and he was all huffy, saying things like, ‘You’re too young to date!’ ‘That’s so stupid!’. They’re only seven, so it’s nothing serious, but it was pretty funny.

Oh, there’s also M. Who used to give me a really hard time, but lately is being awesome. She was so good in class on Saturday, so I made sure to tell her mum what a good job she did. Her mum was really happy, so she was like YAY WAY TO GOOO and that made M super happy as well. So hopefully we’ll continue down this path of awesomeness. She would also like to go drink tea with another little boy who takes English lessons with us. They are six.

In other school related news, one of my classes now says ‘awesome’, because I say ‘awesome’ all the time. They are four and five. It’s… for lack of a better word, awesome.

I also have a little one, who’s two, who now knows the word ‘no’. Her mother probably hates me, because she frequently says, NONONONONOONONONONO. She’s super cute though, and sounds like Pengu — and I mean that in a good way. She’s just two, so you can’t expect her to have amazing language skills at this point, haha.

This past week was a really good week at school. My classes went really well, for the most part. Oh, and I learned from JW (who is seriously adorable, he’s a chubby little boy who’s just super genki) that if you don’t eat carrots, you can’t make it into first grade.

I have one class on Thursday that’s all boys. It’s one of the most fun classes to teach, because they’re a great group of kids who are really funny and just like to have a good time. The only downside is that they do speak a lot of Japanese in class, when they’re not supposed to. They also know they’re not supposed to.

So, when they start speaking a lot (asking questions to better understand is one thing, but F especially just chatschatschats in Japanese… or English…. he just talks a lot in general. Awesome kid, though), I remind them that it’s ‘English time’. Every time I go, ‘It’s English time!’ They all go, ‘ENGLISH TIME!’. I have a class (again of all boys, and again really fun because they get along well and joke a lot) on Saturday who does the same thing.

But in the Thursday class, it’s too much, so it gets to be a problem. No one likes having their name on the board, and I don’t want them to thing speaking Japanese is bad, I just want them to know that it’s time to practice English. So we’ve made a little game. Everyone gets their name on the board at the beginning of class, and everytime they speak and exessive amount of Japanese (and not being a legitimate question) they get a strike. It’s three strikes and you’re out, but no one’s gotten that many yet.

It’s funny, because they like to call each other out. So if it’s like two words, you get their other classmates going, ‘JAPANESE! JAPANESE! JAPANESE!’. The one who spoke in Japanese, usually goes, ‘NONONONONONONONONONNONO’. And sometimes they decide to tell me that they were speaking Chinese instead (which clearly it’s not, because I understand Japanese and I don’t understand Chinese -_-).

Anyways. It’s fun. That’s the main point behind that.

Next week is Halloween, and I’m still trying to decide what to wear for a costume.

It’s a kids version, more or less.

On the cover, is a blonde girl (obviously Emma) dressed in white with white flowers in her hair.

According to one of the kids at school, the book is about 「エイドリエン先生の結婚式」… Adrienne-sensei’s Wedding.

I don’t think I can offer any other comment, haha. It was cute.

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It’s funny, because at first I was so nervous to teach that class — I’ve never had much experience with really young kids. Most of my piano students and summer school students were from seven to twelve. But, I actually really love teaching those classes. The parents are all super nice, and the kids are ridiculously adorable.

Every week we do greetings like hello, my name is and their age. We go over counting, colours and the days of the week, then learn a new set of vocabulary and do a craft that’s related to the words.

One of the girls I teach went with her family to the states for a three week holiday. Her mum told us that one of the days of their vacation, they were on the train, and someone asked her (the child), how old she was.

She replied, I’m two.

Her mum was so impressed and proud! Haha. I guess it shows that our classes are paying off!

It made me really happy to hear that she was able to use the English that she’s learned like that. I know it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I think it’s pretty exciting.