Ainosato Higashi Elementary School

When I asked my homestay family if it would be OK to stay an extra week here in Sapporo, I was asked by my homestay mother if I could possibly visit the elementary school of three of her four children. I immediately said yes. The school is around 100m from where I have been staying, and the quality of the school and its staff matches the Ainosato neighbourhood in general. That is to say that the school has a high standard and level of expectation from its teachers and students.I was told this by several parents, teachers and by the school's principal. In the morning and after my classes, I also got a complete school tour, and could see a lot of interesting things happening. Like the pictures show, this elementary has a massive music hall for teaching all the basic instruments in Japanese elementary education, as well as for larger classes like mine.  And all of the classrooms are like those of the University attached elementary in that they are open classroom designs, without walls to block off sound and movement between similar grades. After the day's lessons, the principal and I had a great talk together about the current practices in English education in elementary schools in Japan, along with the questions back and forth about similarities between Canada and Japan's schools. On this particular day, and once a month, the school is open to the families of the students, so things were fairly hectic. I think that this extra energy helped my lessons, and helped the students be as 'genki' as possible!

Asking the students, "Who likes okonomiyaki?"

Much of my classtime with the students on Friday was used to show the various classes pictures of my home, my family, and the things in Canada which differ from Japan. Jon Wolfe and I had used a similar game in the junior high schools of Sapporo during the exchange, but elementary students have a much more narrow band of available English. As a result, I made a presentation using some of the most basic and common English sentence structures. I felt that the most important thing during my lessons was engagement and having the students practice simple and useful English vocabulary. Thankfully, the principal and other teachers liked the lesson. Because each class has different interests, and different grades have different abilities, my slideshow was rather open-ended, and included a question and answer portion at the end. This is where things got interesting, with some students asking about food, others about sports and the grade six students really obsessed about Canadian money! lol

My captive audience! ^^

After this introduction, each class exchanged a musical performance. For my part, I played Stan Rogers song, "Northwest Passage"on piano and sang the main vocal line. To make it more interesting for the students, I asked them to clap on the offbeat, something which is difficult for anyone, and it gave the song a nice feel. In turn, each class performed one Japanese song for me, two of which I managed to record on my voice recorder! I'm not sure if I can find a way to upload them to this blog, but will search out a solution in the next few days.
In reflection, I really like using a general lesson framework over and over, because it gives me the chance to really learn about the students, and what they want to learn. The constant factor in this type of scientific exploration is my lesson, but the outcomes were very different whether I taught a group of 4th graders or 6th graders. Likewise, the type of jokes and questions they like is varied by age and personality, and using an understood lesson helps me focus on the observations of the students, rather than my own uncertainy of the material.

A brief clapping rehearsal

Post performance high fives!! A job well done. The student performances were amazing!