This Summer vacation Jono and I were able to choose to teach English classes for community members instead of going to school and staring into space for 4 or so hours (in between holidays that is)! They have been so much fun and the older Japanese students have been so cute and keen to learn. Jono and I have also been teaching with fellow Americans Taube, Karen, Cecy, Steve, Lexi, Heather and Suvanya. (Pictured: From left to right is Cecy, Taube, me and Steve and probably the smallest class we've had all Summer behind us.) To make things simple we worked together on a schedule which saw the same type of lessons done each week; Monday - Conversational English, Tuesday - Cultural, Wednesday - Cooking / Music (alternate weeks), Thursday - Movie Day, Friday - Games / Student presentations (alternate weeks).
One of our favourite activities was one Jono and I prepared and it was based around expressions; facial and verbal. We gave each person one facial expression and a clump of clay. They had to keep their expression a secret and mould the clay to portray the expression. They all had such fun making them. Then we assigned a number to each face and we had to guess what expression each face was. There were some pretty interesting models around! Jono modelled "sick" and even had the spew coming out of its mouth!
Cooking was a very popular and fun lesson. First we gave them a taste test of some different foods we eat as snacks including tomato and cheese on crackers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, popcorn and Coke and we also introduced them to Vegemite. Here is Eiko getting stick right into it. One of the older Japanese women LOVED it and called the taste "divine"!!! She was so cute.
For the cooking lesson Jono ran one recipe; buschetta and I ran the other; peanut butter chippers. We had lots of fun cooking with everyone and watching their reactions when they tasted the food that they created. Bruschetta was a huge success.This week we had a music lesson and for the warm up we got everyone (23 students plus teachers) doing the Macarana for 5 minutes!! It was so much fun and so funny to watch Toshi, a sweet older man with no rhythm, giving it a go. Bill had us all singing the backstreet boys "Shape of my Heart" and Eiko started doing the Macarana during the instrumental part of the song! Classic.
At our Last English lesson for the Summer Vacation some students gave presentations on topics of their choice. They did so well and impressed us with their language skills. Eiko spent over an hour preparing her ikibana the previous afternoon (flower arranging) in this traditional style and then spoke about it. Toshi showed photos of his time teaching Japanese in Sydney for 10 weeks. Keiko read us a story and talked about the importance of reading to children. After class the many Japanese students were busily flittering around the room decorating it for the "Thank you" party they are putting on for all teachers tonight. It should be a great show.