Week 3 Update

Written by: Laura R.

Monday, March 2nd

Travel day to Sanda!

Sanda is where we will be this whole month working with Sunrise Ministries and their education center. It was a fairly easy travel day, just taking the trains to the end of their service. Andy, who is a part of Sunrise, picked us up from the train station and brought us straight to tonkatsu. (Tonkatsu is fried pork/chicken with rice. Often served at a diner-like restaurant, but Japanese). Yum!

We got a tour of the Flip Education Center building, which we’re staying at on the third floor. This is an after-school English program that’s held by Sunrise. We’ll tell you more about it in a later blog. 😊

Pretty much the rest of the day we chilled, hung out with Andy, and played Life (one of our favorite board games 🙃).

Tuesday, March 3rd

This day was essentially an all-day team meeting with the Sunrise Ministries team here: Peter, Wendi, and Andy. After our meeting we hung out with Peter and Wendi’s family- losing in (I mean… playing) Mario Kart with their kids and eating Japanese Curry for dinner.

Unfortunately, The Flip Education Center isn’t holding any English classes for the month because of the corona virus. With Mark’s experience teaching English online to Chinese kids through VIP Kids, we’ve been helping them get some online classes rolling. Most of this meeting was getting to know each other and figuring out the platform we want to use to teach.

Wednesday, March 4th

This was a crash course day in the Flip Center’s education philosophy, methods, and curriculum. Most of our day was spent learning how they teach and putting together a lesson plan for online classes.

Thursday, March 5th

Practicing teaching our online classes to each other day.

With this being a new platform, and with us still learning their teaching methods, we decided to go through practice classes.

We got to break for some sushi with Peter and Wendi. It was a great time to hear more of their story and learn more about Sunrise Ministries. 😌

Friday, March 6th

Teaching day. 😊

We didn’t have a ton of classes, but Mark and I enjoyed the ones that we did. Classes went smoothly, and the students seemed to have fun. Peter and Wendi explained that technology in the house isn’t very common here, so the idea of online classes is new for a lot of their students.

Hopefully the online classes pick up this coming week!

After classes, Mark, Andy, and I went to eat ramen to celebrate Friday night. 🍜

Saturday, March 7th

Rest day.

We took this day pretty slow since we both had sore throats. Our greatest fear was we had brought Coronavirus here after traveling through Seattle. However, Mark and I are both feeling better now, so crisis adverted.👍🏻

In the morning I went to Andy’s Japanese tutor session to see how he learns with his language buddy. Both Mark and I have a high value for language learning and see it as a huge tool in ministry to connect with our Japanese friends. We both are continuing to study Japanese and grow.

Sunday, March 8th

Rest day 2.

At night we had some Japanese high schoolers from Andy’s Wednesday night English class over to watch a movie. It was a fun time to get to know them, especially with classes being cancelled.

Monday, March 9th

We met with Peter and Wendi in the late morning to talk about their vision for being here, and to plan out the week a bit.

The weather was so warm, in the afternoon I went exploring on a walk and found my new favorite walking spot

We finished up the afternoon helping Peter and his son, Toby, trim a tree. It was nice to collaborate together on a project other than teaching, and to get to know them both better.

Another week of online classes! We’ll keep you all posted. 😊

Thank you for following,

Laura & Mark