Ashi means feet in Japanese. Figured I'd go ahead and solve that little mystery for you.
So, Friday I headed to the Elementary school as I always do on Fridays to teach some fun and simple English to little kids. This week I only had two lessons, one with the 5th graders and one with the 6th graders. I had decided to do body parts this time in the hopes that they might not know them all (colors and numbers ended up being just games since they already knew all of them in English). Well, the song "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" is popular here so they know those bits, but I didn't teach all of them. Call me silly but I happen to think that the words arm, hand, leg, and foot and more important than shoulders, knees, and toes. But even without the song they pretty much knew the word 'head' because of soccer. You know, when you use your head. That's called 'head'.
Anyhow, with the 5th graders, after an introduction and a bit of goofiness to keep them interested they seemed to have the hang of the material so we went into a game. Pretty simple. They split into four teams and each team had a pile of papers with images of each of the body parts we had just gone over (with two of the legs, arms, ears, eyes, and hands). I called out a body part and they had to run up, find it, and bring it to me. The first one to deliver it got to put it on the board with a piece of tape in an effort to build a whole body. Everything was going well and when all the kids had had a chance and time was almost up we did our last round, only to end with a four way tie! Well, of course we had to have a tie-breaker but I could see that the next kid for one of the teams was an especially smart kid who has probably had some English tutoring. Didn't seem quite fair to me so I had the teams pick there champion and we had a playoff that way. That one kid won anyhow, but at least I felt better about it. And the other kids didn't seem to mind.
Then, with the sixth graders, I ran into a different problem. Namely, I forgot to bring the tape dispenser with me so we couldn't tape the body parts onto the board. Crisis? Nahhh. I just had them DRAW the parts up there which ended up being even better because we ended up with some wacky, wacky looking partial people. This time however, we didn't have a fair fight with a tie. Instead we had one team which horribly dominated the whole game. It was bad. One team didn't get a single point. Well, the prizes this time were play American money (Thanks Dad!) and everyone on the winning team got one. Then I gave the other teams as many bills as they had points and let them share (or fight, whatever). Still, one team had no points like I said and I felt bad about sending them away empty handed after being so close in a few rounds. So I gave them the 'booby prize'. Since everyone else was getting fake $100 bills, I gave them a fake penny. Again, this was great because the plastic fake coin is apparently far more interesting than the paper fake bill and they felt quite pleased with what they got.
And that's how you teach English! Well, not really. Some people like to do it differently.
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Well, at Elementary and Kindergarten there IS no English teacher. There isn't even a teacher that speaks English. So, when I'm there it's all me. I decide what to teach, how to teach it, what games to play, how to run them. Everything except when to start and when to stop class. The teachers help as much as they can and if I ask them to give me hand with anything they are more than happy to do so. But it's better to explain everything before class to avoid utter sensei confusion.
At the JHS, there is always at least one other English teacher and they are in charge. I'm just an assistant there so I run everything by them before class and then we do the activity together. This is much less work since we have a textbook to work through so my job is just to made add-ons to the text, instead of designing and running whole lessons on my own.
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