First day of training

We had a pseudo-training day on Friday, which was spent mostly familiarizing us with various cultural concerns, basic job requirements, and how to find our way around Takatsuki. That session was only the 5 new AETs.

Today we had our first proper training day, with all AETs (old and new). Our trainer/supervisor is an American called Dave. I think he said he's been in Japan for 17 years, so he has a pretty good idea of how things work, and he seems very helpful and friendly too.

We started working through the recommended curriculum for the year 5 students. We have a set of books called Eigo Nooto, one for each year level (5&6). They're the books the students will use, and they have minimal writing in them, with lots of pictures. We went through with the accompanying CD, and looked at the activities, and discussed good ways of making the activities/songs work. In many cases, we had to act the skits out/sing the songs, to prepare us for the classroom. It was good silly fun. We laughed a lot.

The idea is not to focus purely on English, but also to promote an awareness of the world at large. One of the activities we did involved learning to count in a number of different languages. I did Czech, which was interesting. One of the guys decided that the Czech word for four sounded like "stiffy", after which, I'm afraid I lost control of the (adult) class... Working with kids is going to be quite a change after programming...