#jet alt

New video is up! 👩‍🏫 "Teaching in Japan! My Job on the JET Programme"

Got around and did a design again! Outlaw and Gunslinger ( @pants-lint) youngest one, Firewater!

With that all the main family have a reference sheet! Might redo Ace’s though .-.

Animal Crossing/Spring English Board

So Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out around this time last year. Everyone was super excited about it, and every ALT I knew was doing Animal Crossing English Boards or decorations. I wanted in on the hype, so I made my little Animal Crossing board that I thought was super cute and the kids would love….and then the schools closed and absolutely no one saw it. It’s now a year later and there…

Inaka Life: The Pint-Sized Fire Precaution Patrol

I spend my Mondays working at kindergarten, which generally means that I have no idea what I’m walking into every Monday morning. Sometimes I teach a mini English lesson, sometimes I’m a classroom aide (I’m an expert at 4 year olds into jackets if I do say so myself), sometimes I’m just there to play. It’s really a toss-up. Every year, the kiddos get a visit from the local fire department to…

I’ve  been with this set of 6th graders for 2 years, and I’m really going to miss them. That didn’t stop me from being incredibly proud to see them graduate. We don’t have uniforms in elementary school, but the kids wear their new middle school uniforms when they graduate. Their parents buy the uniforms to last a couple years, so they’re always a bit big. Watching these kids enter the ceremony while shuffling around in uniform jackets that hang over their fingertips and pants that are bunched up a bit around the ankles if just so….😭😭😭

  They have one final meeting in their classroom, then all the students and teachers line the hallways for 送る会(sending off). The graduates walk through the hallways of the school and we cheer and clap for them. This is the last time they’ll walk in this school as students.

Now that the ceremony is over and pictures have been taken, everyone will go home. The teachers will all gather in the staffroom and eat a special celebratory bento and eat the snacks and cakes that the PTA gave us. And of course, talk about the kids who are leaving and remember them. Then we move on to get ready for the new incoming 1st graders. And so it goes on.

Goodbye, my little friends. Be good in junior high school.

So here’s the board as a whole. I’ll go over all the bits and pieces next.

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The interactive activity for this board is to have the kids vote on what their favorite flower is so we can see what the favorite is in school. The selection of flowers to choose from is honestly just what came to my mind at the time.

I voted for sunflower!

Next, is some vocab words for spring. These are also just what I could think of at the time, so they might be a bit random. Using vocab words related to particular seasons or events is one of my favorite things to include on my boards, because it gives the kids a chance to learn words that we wouldn’t necessarily be studying in class.

This little guy is my town’s mascot, Suisen-chan. Our town flower is the daffodil and Suisen-chan is a daffodil boy, so I knew I had to include daffodils in the board. Honestly making those daffodils was probably the hardest part of this entire board, because I am really not good at paper crafts.

That about finishes up the spring-related parts. On to graduation! I figured it would be a good idea to point out the most important graduation-related word: congratulations. Whenever I write vocab words in English, I always make sure to include the katakana readings as well. This makes it so students won’t be intimidated by the reading and may actually be able to identify the sound of the words.

As graduation nears, I’ve had many students ask me about my experience with elementary graduation in America. They are shocked to find out that elementary school graduation isn’t a thing AND that by the time I was in 6th grade, I was already in middle school. Because of questions like these, I decided to make this chart that compares grades in the USA and Japan.

As always, I have a note from Gunma-chan and I for the students. This time, we’re wishing the 6th graders well as they move on to middle school.

And of course, to celebrate graduation and the epitome of Japanese spring, I added some cherry blossom branches. Of all the educational signs and design I put into this board, my fellow teachers were by far the most impressed by the branches. They even said that walking by my board gave a feeling of hanami (cherry blossom viewing), which has also turned my board into kind of a sightseeing spot that teachers who wouldn’t normally go by have gone up to see. So that’s still pretty satisfying, even if they aren’t actually appreciating the English in the English Board.