xoan.xapon

  We did this activity in class where students reviewed the numbers and the amount of things. I had previously made chibi characters of some of the 一年生 teachers and I use these characters intensively in my classes. In this activity, I ask "how much are Mr. Matsuda's trousers?", "They are 21 dollars."  "How much is Ms. Nagahata's cap?" "It's 68 dollars." Later we had a speaking test where the students, in pairs, memorised the lines and presented. After lunch, I went back home to change to some cooler clothes because it was too hot and I went to the city hall for our monthly MEP MAP meeting. Brian, Lily, and Scott presented some of the things they do in their classes and honestly i was kind off caught off guard because i was a few minutes late because I had to find the building and I needed to ask the front desk for help. I also didnt know we were doing presentations now, but anwyay, i think its good to get some ideas from the other ALT...

I started joining classes for the playroom students around 2 weeks ago, and today I did a special class for Nagiちゃん who has been learning about the days and the months. He has some difficulty remembering things so its a bit challenging for him to memorise all the days and months. It is especially hard for him for example to remember how to read August. From what I observed, he uses cues, like he doesnt fully read the words but he uses cues. Like he sometimes confuses March and May because of the MA, I guess thats because japanese works with syllables or consonant vowel pairs.  When we told him we were going to play a game, he became so impatient and wanted to finish the lessons quickly. Initially, he wrote the months instead of the days so he had to repeat a few times but he was able to do it.  I brought a mictrocontroller with me so we could do a somewhat different activity which is more exciting. Its still just an introduction at this point so I havent fully integrated it to...

  The things I ordered finally arrived. I went crazy and like ordered three different microcontrollers online and I think I ended up spending aorudn 10000 YEN lol but its okay. I started fiddling with it today and made a prototype for a piano and i managed to make it work. It was difficult in the beginning because I was expecting it to act completely like a Makey makey which is basically just plug and play but this one is different. I still havent used the other two, just the leonardo because of restrictions on my work computer which sucks so maybe it wont be feasible to use both in the future. Anyway, my plan is t o create a club that would maybe meet 2x a week like next semester so I could spend more time with students and get to know them more and a bit more personally and maybe build a better relationship with them so they get to speak English more. In the coming activities, I will probably start to use this thing to make my classes a bit more interactive and fun. We'll see how...

  We continue with the interview activity series, while honestly i feel like we shouldnt really have spent so many days on these since i prefer to be able to just umm play games with the students especially because theyre graduating soon but anyway. I think the activity was kind of a success. In the first class it was well, not good because it wasnt too structured but it improved since we turned it to a game where I ask them a question and they answer with "You..." and with Omori sensei or Sora sensei asking, they asnwer with "He...". It was cool.  I remember in one class, one student Kanata-kun, whom I met at the supermarket with his family a few days prior, asked my program "Do you like me?" looool. When we met at the supermarket, he asked for a "two shotto" which later I realised was tsuu shotto which is a picture with two people. Sometimes I feel like a celebrity with some of my students. LOL actually, sometimes i feel pressured to keep up be...

  For a few months now, I enjoy generating AI pictures of me in my classes. Lol pictures like these. So I use these in class, in this particular one, we are working on the simple past, with the context of things I did in the winter holidays. "buy a souvenir", "eat osechi dishes", "visit grandma/ a shrine", "see Tokyo Tower" etc.  In the first class, I had more control since I did most of the powerpoint. I was late because I completely forgot about the class since it keeps on changing. Maybe Kanehara sensei starts to think I'm very incompenent lol but not quite since I do most of the worksheet and the powerpoint so he knows I'm not lazyy. He just knows that I am bad at time management.  In the second class, I wasn't late. Actually, I attended a class I didnt have to attend because I got confused with the schedule again. We just continued the class like that and answered the worksheets. In the third class, we had the BOE visiting and T1...

  In this class, I prepared a program for practicing "May I" and some other prendas like sneakers, pants, shorts, jacket, watch, bracelet.  In the program, students practiced the dialogue: This ______ is so ______. May I try ___ on? I think its a good activity because the students could practice on their own without feeling shy. They just practiced with their computers. Although for some of them, it got a bit frustrating because the program couldnt understand what they were saying. On the other part, they feel quite accomplished when it finally recognised their pronunciation. Well, its a given that its not a phoneme level checker, but I think the value is that they could practise without feeling nervous because its just them and their computer. What I did to reinforce the activity was to go around helping them individually in the things they found challenging. Of course it was difficult to attend to everybody but I think it kind of helped. This is the first time I actually ha...

Google slides In this activity, I prepared a quiz with around 15 questions, and around 60 cards to play go fish. I had the class divide into their respective teams and I ask the class a question one at a time. The team has to talk to each other and write their answer on a piece of paper provided. If they answer it correctly, they receive a card which they can use to play the 2nd part of the game.  The quiz finishes with the team having around 7 plus cards and we start the 2nd round which is basically just go fish. Students will try to get cards from each other by asking "Do you have XXX card?" If the team they ask have the card/s that team has to give all to them. They can go for another turn if they were able to get a card from another team (max 2 turns). They can only ask for a card that they have.  The students quite enjoyed the activity trying to strategise and remember whos got which card and getting frustrated if they ask the wrong team.  A funny incident was when a...

  interviewer / interviewee activity Last week, Omori sensei asked if i could do the ALT interview activity and i tried to stick to the activity itself and brainstormed different ideas and in the end came up with different situations where a famous person is interviewed by someone. i used a code for the questionnaire for the interviewer and interviewee, and also another code for the dialogue conversation.  This morning, Omori sensei said she was sick and that she would go home, i was wondering why she went to school but i think this is another difference in culture. In the class, i guess everybody was doing it except for some students but mostly they did it. I think it went off without a hitch and i am glad.  There was a student who was intently looking at me and i didnt know how to react and just brushed it off. Sometimes i wonder what students are thinking.  In the last class, something made me feel kind of good inside, when one student commented how i do most of t...

 Yesterday they made me attend a meeting and honestly i didnt understand anythign i shouldnt have been there at all but anyway, once it finished i could leave. The meeting i guess was about student performance data in matsubara or in the school where im at. i dont know to be honest because most of the time i dont understand anything. 

I dont know why but for some reason I thought the MEP MAP meeting was today. I guess it was because they talked about it on the group chat a few days ago that i finally assumed it was today. I left school early, missed one class and went all the way to machuu. What a waste of time. I even ate at osaka ohsho.  In my first two classes, I did the dixit inspired activity where i described a picture to students while they drew. It was fun in the first two classes but in the last one i dont htink the students were much into it.

 hoy los alumnos de primero me dijo mientras despidiendo me, You are angeru. youre an angel. lol 

Matilda and Noah came to school again today to participate in the Kahoot game for 1st grade. I think the enjoyed it a lot, they were so excited when playing the game. I didn:t do much really, i just walked around and chatted with some of the students.  In the morning I just worked on the dixit cards im going to maybe use in sixth grade. The activity is like ummm i want them to descrbie things use there is/are its it has etc i think its going to be a bit difficult but im going to try. I used different monsters from different continents like the aswang, the Santa campana, baba yaga, wendigo, and some others that i dont remember. I also added soem czech ones.   

 I completely forgot that we changed the schedule so this morning, I was caught off guard when Yuuki sensei told me that we had three classes together, I was hoping to take the whole day off, kind of, like not doing anything, but I was busy until 5th period. on the 4th period, well, |I was very busy too looking for free concerts and I also even booked the candle light christmas concert, which now that I look back, maybe I shouldve booked the Ghibli one because i might get a ticket in the  Anyway, in class, we did the I want to go to, want to see, and to eat activity and honestly, it was such a suprise to me to find out that Japanese students, like 1st of ESO equivalent, are not very techy. Like I didnt expect that at all. 

Many times with some teachers, I just dont know whats happening. I think there is always this chance of miscommunication and I often fiind myself in unexpected situations. Like today, I asked and confirmed whether the class would me at 13:30 and I got confirmation only to find out that its actually the previous period. Also Ive been told that there would be visitors like visiting teachers to watch classes but on the first class, nobody came. Then today, during 5th period, i arrived to class, and there were lots of visitors. like oh wow. I guess the miscommunication stemmed from when I asked when our class would start. I think instead of the first class, what happened was, Yuuki sensei thought I was asking about the class with visiting teachers. 

What a downer really, so i think this is the reason why i dont get along well with the other alts. I dont know. i was generating some characters for a trading card game modeled on the other alts but one of them got upset, oh well. I really think i wont be good friends with any of them. Its a pity, well i acknowledge that i should have asked first before doing it but yeah i seem to think that whatever i do is okay, but its not. so i will be more careful next time. 

I worked on the mini box theatre and finished maybe 80% of it. I figured out what to do to change the pictures, I cut a hole on the top side and i put a pulling tab for each image.  Later had 2 meetings, the first one i dont even know why i had to attend, i understood nothing and the only thing i got out of it is a headache. Then i had another meeting with Eri, Takumi, Matilda and Noah which was easier and we discussed the collaborative activity that we will after a forthnight. 

 No estoy seguro pero pienso en algo. O sea a veces pienso que Sora no me aguanta que no me habla mucho. y a veces me ignoraba pero cada vez que hagamos una clase y la terminamos juntos, me habla mas. por ejemplo hoy me dio las gracias sobre la actividad, y me ayudo ordenar las fichas, y tambien me comento algo sobre mi caja de airpods 

Hoy volví a hacer la actividad del misterio del asesinato y creo que los alumnos la disfrutaron más que la clase de ayer. En realidad, la de ayer fue más bien un experimento, y hoy nos salió mucho mejor. Tenía más materiales preparados y, al final, creo que los alumnos se sintieron como si todo fuera real. Algunos incluso me hicieron comentarios sobre lo interesante e inolvidable que les pareció la actividad. También me aplaudieron después de que Sora les dijera que lo había hecho todo yo solo. Me sentí muy bien por eso, así que espero que en la última clase podamos disfrutarlo aún más. Una cosa que noté es que algunos alumnos tienden a complicarse un poco, o sea, piensan demasiado en lugar de fijarse en las pistas. Por ejemplo, algunos intentan descifrar cada palabra una por una. Otro ejemplo es cuando se les ocurre que la etiqueta se puede despegar y que podría haber algo escrito escondido al revés. La verdad es que me pareció muy interesante. Incluso un alumno llegó a pensar que la...

  I finally finished the murder mystery game I was working on and we did it today in class. There were some issues in the beginning like maybe it was a bit difficult to explain it to the class but I think it went off without a hitch.  1st clue - i think i missed on how they figured this one out. but eventually they found out that the killer is wearing glasses. 2nd clue - i might have made the dragon picture puzzle too difficult because some groups didnt finish it. But this is the first one they finished. 3rd clue - i played the recording maybe 3x. I wasnt sure how to do this bit but maybe next time i will play it in the background,  4th clue - probably a difficult for them, though it wasnt too difficult at all. Other notes is that some students saw my apple watch and asked who Sayaka was. 

  I had been working all afternoon yesterday on this, since last week the teachers had asked me for ideas on how to use ICT in the class. So I figured maybe I could use genially to teach the past tense. My initial idea was to prepare the template, using the book Little People Big dreams, Stephen Hawking and prepare two slides for each team. They would need to identify the verbs, then turn it to the past tense. That didnt happen because it turned out more complicated than I had imagined. The first class honestly was kind of a disaster. Anyway, we did end up using vocaroo for the recording and pronunciation practice.  After first period, I had to revise and do it all again. Initially i did everything on genially but had a problem because i thought i could easily add audio to genially, no. You have to have a paid account, or do it in a more roundabout way. Then I did it on google slides. Using https://luvvoice.com/ i recorded the text, and redid the slides on google slides. ...