Week four

Part 1: Work

This week is our last week with Elementary students, which is a little bit bitter-sweet feeling for me. I always found it harder to do chat sessions with elementary students due to the severe language barrier and their nature of being more energetic. So I always have to use some tricks as well as come up with games in order to drag back their attentions and keep them concentrated. I mentioned my tricks in the previous post;) I think it might be useful if you are going to work with kids.

Since it is our last day with elementary, Minhyuk and I prepared a poster as well as a presentation. For the poster, we want it to be culturally relevant to our own country but we did not go deep because of students' level of comprehension and language skill. I used Panda as the icon because when I first introduced myself in the class, students would ask me if I like Panda and they are very excited when I said YES. I think using the image of Panda could draw attention from them as well as respond to their interest. Besides, I used lots of pictures of foods as visual aid to introduce the cuisine culture in China. I started with the Chinese dishes that are more popular and common in Japan according to the answers fro from Japanese students so students can feel a sense of familiar when they start reading it. I didn't know that 担担面 (a kind of noodle dishes from Szechuan province) and 小笼包 (It's similar to dumpling, a dish from Shanghai) are the most popular Chinese dishes in Japan. However, in the U.S., hot pot and dim sum are the popular ones. Many Japanese students that I talked to do not know about dim sum even when I show them the picture. It's very interesting for me to see that there are different trends of Chinese foods in different countries.

In addition to the poster, our presentation focus more on our experience and the different education systems that we have been through. I mainly focused on the school in China, especially elementary school because it's their age. Also, my brother is in six grade right now so I also mentioned about his experience. For the school in China, students are required to wear uniform and it is very lecture based. Students need to sit up straight and raise their hands for questions... and the most different part is that we have an average class size of 45-50 whereas they only have about 30 students in one class.

In the end of presentation, students gave us some comments with teacher's help. I remember one student said "Even though I don't understand everything you said, but I was happy that you came to the classroom. It's very fun." When the class is over, some students wait for us to give them a high-five and told us "Thank you". This is my first internship for education and it has left me so much new experiences and that was a very meaningful and fulfilling moment for me, as an educator.

Part 2: Explore and adventure

Asakusa shrine and Sky tree are very close (about 1.2km), which is about 15 mins walk? It's very interesting to see how Tokyo can hold both traditional and modern sites at the same time. The views are amazing:)

1. Asakusa shrine, one of the traditional and popular shrines in Tokyo.

2. Sky Tree, one of the most modern architecture

That's it for this week~thank you for reading!