1. Special Education Class at な中 is only 5 students strong, three girls and two boys. They have varying degrees of affliction, but are pretty high functioning. They just need a separate class period a couple times a day. Sometimes, I attend the class with Mother Sensei and we do a simple English lesson together. It usually involves playing games with picture cards ("Karuta") for 20 minutes or more.
But yesterday was different. I went to the class with Mother Sensei and was greeted by their broad, genki smiles. Today was for practicing actions like "walk," "eat," "open," "close," "stand" and "sit." After some drilling, we played Simon Says...
...at one point I had the students stand up then eat and they all stood still despite the fact Simon had clearly Said. Mother Sensei laughed and applauded them for good manners. In Japan, it's usually rude to stand and eat (though there are exceptions for matsuri food and train station ramen stands) and the students were showing me how well-mannered they were!
After Simon Says, they were getting a little distracted. I'm still a novelty to students, so they're always full of questions. Yesterday, Mother Sensei decided to indulge them after one student asked if I could speak Japanese and I said "Sukoshi dake" (Only a little).
They decided to test my Japanese. Mother Sensei would give me an English sentence and I'd translate it to Japanese. It was pretty simple stuff ("My name is Marta." "I like ramen." "I come to school by car.") and the students got a kick from it. Then they asked questions in English with Mother Sensei's help and I answered in a little English and Japanese.
Then one student wanted to know if I could write kanji. I wrote on the board "私はマルタです." Applause all around. Then they wanted to know my favorite kanji...that's a thing, apparently. So I wrote "私は（森）が好きです." But I wrote "suki" wrong and the students helped me fix it. For 50 minutes, we just talked in Japanese and English, teaching each other.
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