#I know december 1st is a little early.... but I saw my friend posting theirs and it prompted me to start so I couldn't help myself hehe!

[qilinkisser]

It's that time of year again!

[maddieinjapan]

First Actual Week of School (10/02 - 10/06)

Due to exams, sports day, and random national holidays, this was my first week of following a normal schedule! At times it was slightly overwhelming and very confusing, but overall it was fun. 

    On Monday, I had a day off, since it was a national holiday. I just did homework for the first half of the day, and after lunch I played Wii with my host sisters. I was really fun and it was nice to play the same games that I loved when I was younger. For dinner, I met with one of my dad’s friends and her family at the US embacy compound. We had hamburgers for dinner and Oreos for dessert, and since they’ve only been in Japan for about 2 months now, it was nice to share my expericenes with them and hear about all theirs as well. After dinner, I got to watch an episode of The Office, on their TV, (which is blocked in Japan as well as Game of Thrones), and then she took me home via subway. Overall the dinner was realy fun and the family was really nice and welcoming to me. 

    On Tuesday, I had Math first period. Since every class I attend is taught in Japanese, I really have no idea what’s going on ever. My math teacher, Mr. Kai, gave me the math textbook they use in class, but it was all in Japanese. Since it was the first day back after exams, everyone was just getting back thier tests, so I didn’t really pay attention and wrote things in my planner the entire period. Second and third period, I had my Japanese lesson. It was fun, and I started to learn Kanji and verb conjugations. I got to read the little notes in the front of the book that girls in previous years had written, as well as the “がんばって” note that somebody had written right next to the verb conjugation section. I’m pretty sure that “がんばって” translates to “good luck.” Before lunch, I had self study. After lunch, some of my friends invited me to play badmitton in the gym with them. We played for about 20 minutes and it was really fun! I never really saw the point in playing Badmitton, but now I think it’s really fun and I’m thinking about joining Badmittion club! After lunch, I had PE with the second graders. To my suprise, Mariko was in the class, and we had a lot of fun talking the entire period. In gym, we played dogdeball, which I’m really bad at, but it’s okay because I had fun anyways. For my final period of the day, I had Advisory/Self Study. Advisories don’t exsist at St. Margaret’s so “Advisory” for me is just meeting with Mr. Y and talking about upcoming events I need to know about, or problems that I have. I asked him about what I’m supposed to do in Math, and he said not to worry about it. It was a short meeting, and I went back to the library for the rest of the period. After school everyday at St. Margaret’s there’s this thing called club time, and it’s just basically about an hour and a half after school when clubs hold their practices. Different clubs meet on different days, and there are all kinds of clubs that you can go to. As far as I know, I think you have to join a club and stick with it for the rest of the year. For next two weeks, I’m just looking around at all the clubs I’m interested in so I can pick which one I’ll enjoy the most. For my first look at the clubs, Mariko showed me Kendo club, which she’s in. It was really interesting to watch, and I even tried on the white uniform and hit the practice dummy a few times. Everyone was super nice and the teacher was pretty laid back and funny, but I don’t think I’m going to join just because it takes a really long time to master all of the basic motions and I probably won’t be in Japan long enough to actually fight in a match with someone. After Kendo with Mariko, I went home with Haruka, who’s in Choir.

    On Wednesday, I don’t have Japanese, which is kind sad, but it gives me a chance to spend a little more time on my homework. I had Self Study first and Math second. At the beginning of Math class, Mr. Kai gave me another math textbook with some pages marked, an answer book for all the problems, and a couple of sheets of paper with a bunch of equations on them. He told me that this was all the work I needed to do by the beginning of December. I recognized most of the problems, and just worked on them until the end of class. For third and fourth period, I had handbells with the third graders. I’ve taken handbells before, when I was in 5th grade, but it was still difficult. They started a new song, Amazing Grace, so for the first part of class, everyone was highlighting their parts. Since I’m new to the class, I played with a partner. She was really nice and showed me what parts I should highlight and the differnt bells I have to play. Since I already know how to play handbells and kind of read music, the only difficult part was figuring out what meausre we were playing. It was a new song for everyone, so we were stopping and replaying meaures a lot. Despite that, it was fun and kind of interesting to be playing handbells again. (Edit: I actually had Handbells on Thursday and Japanese Calligraphy during this time. I realized this once I had finshed writing this post.) After lunch I played Badmittion again, and one of my friends taught me how to serve. Fifth period I had Biology for the first time, and it was not what I was expecting. It started out on a rough foot, because I got to the Bio room 5 minutes before class started, and no one was there and the ligths were all turned off. Confused, I went to the teachers office to ask Mr. Y were my Bio class was. After I showed him that no one was in the classroom, he and I ran around the buidling, asking other science teachers where the class was. Eventually, the other Bio teacher told us it was in that same room, and after we finally went back to the classroom, we found the whole class was sitting there. It was okay though, because the teacher was just handing back the tests. After a couple of minutes, everyone went and got changed in pants and long sleves, because we were gardening, and they are LOTS of mosquitos in Japan. Gardening was interesting, and we took apart all of the supports for the plants (they had died) and started digging up weeds. I thought that we were only going to do that for this class period, and then it would just be a regular Bio class for the rest of the year, but I was wrong. Turns out, Bio is a double period class. For the first hour of every class we garden and dig up weeds, and the second hour they go back inside and have a regular Bio class. Since I have a different class schedule than everyone else does, I only have class during the gardening part, and then I go to gym while everyone else goes inside and has class. It was a nice suprise, and it will be fun to garden and make some freinds for the rest of the year. For the last period of the day, I had gym with the 1st graders. It was kind of boring because I didn’t know anybody in that class and not many people could speak English. We played dodgeball again, which I was really bad at. I’d have to say the worst part of the class was the new warm up dance. In most schools in Japan, there is a warm up dance or routine that everyone does at the beginning of class to strech out and prevent injuries. On Tuesday, I also had to do this new dance, but I was talking and laughing with Mariko the entire time, so it didn;t matter all that much that I had no idea what was going on. On Wednesday, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I had to actually focus on dancing. This dance was much harder than the last one, which I learned how to do pretty well in about 3 days. I looked pretty stupid doing it, and it was really hard to try and keep up. After Gym, I had homeroom, which I have at the end of everyday. On Thursday we have long homeroom, which we can do lots of different things in. As I was about to leave after homeroom had ended, Mr. Y told me that in L.H.R. on Thursday, we were going to be writing speeches on our favorite word or phrases. He told me I could write mine in English, but to try and write as much Japanese as possible. After that, I couldn’t visit any clubs because Haruka had to go home early so she could go to her tutor.

   On Thurday, I had Japanese for the first two periods and then Handbells for the second two. I know I said above that I had Handbells on Wednesday, but I screwed up and looked at my schedule wrong. I actually had Japanese Calligraphy on Wednesday, but I’m writing about it here. Japanese was good and we spent most of the period practicing counting and working on grammar. Japanese Calligraphy with 3rd graders was really interesting, but really hard. Since everyone is already working on pieces of thier own, the teacher gave me a Calligraphy kit and an intructional booklet. I took Calligraphy once in my first week of school, so I had already practiced all the basic strokes. The next thing to do in the packet was practicing some basic Kanji. There was only one small complication: when writing Kanji, stroke order is really really important. Since I had been only learing Kanji for one day, I had no idea what the stroke order was for any of the characters. Despite not knowing that, I practiced writing all of them anyways. For the second hour of class, the teacher asked a couple of girls to help and teach me to write some Kanji. They asked me to pick my favorite Kanji and I picked “日本” which is just “Japan” written in Kanji. They were really helpful and gave me tips on writing certain strokes and taught me the correct stroke order. After Lunch, I played Badmittion again with some of my friends. For 5th period, I had Self Study, and after that, I had Gym class with 1st graders. I was relived because Haruka was in that class. We played dodgeball again, and I was significantly better at it than I had been in previous classes. During long homeroom, we wrote our speeches about our favorite words. I wrote down a bunch of words, but I couldn’t think of anything I liked. I have a few weeks before we present them, so I have some time to decide on a topic. After school, I had to wait for Haruka to get out of choir club, so I just did my homework for about an hour before going home. 

 On Friday, I had Chemistry first period. For the first half of class, the teacher handed back everyone’s test and went over all the answers. Since this was all in Japanese and I couldn’tve understood it if I wanted to, I practiced some Japanese for a few minutes. After that, the teacher started explaining an experiment we would be doing in the next couple of classes that would introduce the new unit. I didn’t understand that either, but from looking at the formulas on the board, I think it was just adding baking soda to vinegar. At the end of the lesson, the teacher gave me the answers to the exam they went over at the beginning of class and told me that they would be doing this experiment for the next two weeks. ( We only meet twice a week) After Chemistry, I had Japanese for two hours, and Math for 4th period. During Japanese, I practiced more numbers, verb grammar, and Kanji. In Math, I worked on my term work some more and got a fair amount done. After lunch, I played Badmitton again. It was a lot of fun and I’ve gotten much better since first playing on Tuesday. For 5th and 6th period I had self study, and I got a lot of Japanese work done. Homeroom was on a special schedule on Friday, because everyone was getting their results from their exams back. It took a long time but it was really fun for me because some of my friends started drawing Disney Characters on the chalk board and had me guess what they were. It was so much fun! After awile, they had me draw some charaters on the board for them to guess. After we ran out of Disney characters to draw, we started drawing company logos. It sounds kind of odd, but it was so much fun and we laughed a lot. After probably an hour of this, Haruka came into my homeroom and talked with everyone. It took a long time for me to be able to finally go home, but I had a lot of fun talking with my friends. I even got to hit the chalk board erasers together and walk all the chalk come out. It was really cool, since I had only ever seen it done in movies, but I got chalk all over me (whoops:) ) My first week of a normal schedule was really fun and it was kind of nice to start and end school at a normal time.

If you read this far, Thank you!!!! I know these posts are really long, but there’s just a ton that happens every week!