School life - Part 1

When we go to school we leave the house at 7:30am and wait for our walking group to come. Our house is about 1km from school so it takes about 20 mins to get there. We walk is all weather except if it is very bad. We wear a yellow cap so that we are easily visible to the traffic. When we get to school we wait for a teacher to open the school and we  go to our classroom and put out our homework. and put our bags in out lockers and workbooks in our desks. We get homework every day. Our homework is normally reading, maths, and Kanji. Kanji is the Japanese writing where you can write a whole word as one letter. We do reading from out text books and have a reading card to mark.
Something different from English schools is you NEVER wear outdoor shoes inside school. Every time anybody (including students, teachers and visitors) goes in or out you change to or from indoor shoes, except for the emergency drill.
Speaking of the emergency drill there are two types: 1. Fire 2. Earthquake We have a special cushion to protect our heads in case something come falling down in an earthquake.

Our school has four floors in the main building. There are some rooms which aren't used much. There are some rooms to do a particular topic. For example Science or Art. There is also a school hall. The hall and main building are separated by the playground. We don't have our lunch in the classroom we eat it in the classroom. It is definitely school dinners, but more on that another time...

Our classroom

There are 21 to 25 people in each class. Our class has 23 people. There is one class in each year group. Normally in Japan there are about 4 classes in each year group.

After putting our things away in class, we do a morning "marathon" or skipping every morning. For the marathon you have to run as much as you can until the music stops. I can go 5 or more laps of the playground, After the marathon or skipping we go inside and do some reading. When the chime sounds we sing the morning song and after that we take the register. The students do the register themselves, sometimes even before the teacher arrives. And then lessons begin... more to follow!