School Festival....

On Tuesday, my morning classes were combined with my afternoon classes so that the first two periods could be cleared for a school festival of sorts.

Each of the classrooms was transformed into either a game room or a haunted house (there were four haunted houses).  Parents came to the event, and received a piece of paper which was stamped to show their participation at each classroom.  The students took turns helping out and wandering.  It was a lot of fun.

I was sitting at my desk, and took the chance to ask the vice-principal if I could go check out the festival.  The happy part was that I asked in Japanese =)  Not very good Japanese, but he understood what I was asking, so I am happy.  That is partially thanks to Beth-san's lesson on Sunday.  Kyoko-san corrected my Japanese on Wednesday when we met.  I need to do more studying on my own.  Any way, that is not the point of this blog.

The first haunted house I went through required crawling, and I was just barely small enough to fit through without knocking the cardboard walls and ceilings over.  The second haunted house I went through allowed a walkway for adults while students crawled. The students were all a lot more hesitant to try to scare any adults (except maybe their own parents, but I was never in the room when that might have happened).

I walked over to where the third and fourth grade classrooms were to spend some time in their game rooms, and when I returned one of the first graders grabbed my hand and led me to the classrooms I had not been to yet.  Unfortunately, the end of second period was drawing to a close and so the classrooms began tearing down their games or houses.

While teaching the first graders, I decided to play "Mr. Wolf" since we had been doing numbers.  I discovered that Mr. Wolf is a lot harder to play with two large classes in one room--even though it was bigger than their classrooms. Each of the classes stood on either side of the room and moved toward each other when I called out a number, so I modified it a bit.  It ended up working out really well and being a lot of fun.