School Festival

Here's another school festival installment. I said I was going to post more and I didn't, so here it's finally coming!!! Above is our school festival poster. The theme is "Change our School." Ironically, not much changed about the festival from last year...

School festival in Japan possibly comparable to homecoming in America. The students have two days of activities. All of it starts off in the gym. The cheer boys start it up, as you saw in my previous post. Then we have a music contest and come commercials that the 3rd year students make to advertise the food they are selling during the next two days. The brass band and guitar club also play pieces that they've prepared.

The first day is closed to the public, and the kids just get to walk around and see everything. Each culture club at school prepares some sort of display and seniors sell food and have some sort of game as well. Third year students sold fried chicken and croquette, ice cream, rice balls, had a bread shop and sold some other Japanese style snacks. Art club sold fans you could paint, tea ceremony club had several ceremonies you could participate in, calligraphy club had papers and brushes so you could do calligraphy, the "domestic" club sold foods with recipes and sold homemade scrunchies, etc, etc, etc.

Tea Ceremony

Seniors selling rice balls -- they had quite the organized system!

Some Mountain Climbing club girls in their tent display.

One of our Mountain Climbing club students -- he has won some prefectural contests. We have a rock wall at our school. Unfortunately I didn't get to try this because I was wearing a skirt!

Cooking club -- so you know how many calories you're consuming. Also, note the scrunchies on top of the table!

Art club fans. Mine is below -- that says "sakura" or cherry blossom in kanji.

Note how much better Saki's looks than mine...

The second day is open to the public, so many parents and alumni stop in throughout the day. It's basically the same as the day before. On day two, the baseball team has a game and the tennis team has matches going on all day as well.

This is one of my favorite things at school here. My students sometimes seem to not have much personality. I realize this is mostly because of a language barrier, but also because it seems all they do is study and think about school!!! During school festival, the kids loosen up and seem to be having much more fun than any other time of year. It's fun to see. I tried to post as many pictures as was practical here, but you should check out all the pictures on flickr. They give the festival more justice. It shows just how much work the kids go to decorating for just two days of festival!!