Halloween Events

Being an English teacher throughout the different seasons I get kind of bored talking about the same Western holidays over and over again to all my different classes. However, yesterday's special event consumed so much time and energy over the weekend it's worth mention here. As part of a PTA sponsored day, 100 elementary students visited the high school where older students had organized activities. I'm grasping for words here because we really don't have any such events in Canada. I find it akin to a large all day baby-sitting service but from the Japanese perspective it is an opportunity to have children from different classes and schools get to know each other and have older students learn leadership and organizational skills in a well supervised environment. With that as background, the English teachers were invited to be part of the day to run a Halloween theme room (complete with terrified small children). Here we had costumes and face painting, pumpkin carving and games. We also did the activity where you blindly put your hand into boxes labeled "Zombie brains" and "Eyeballs" etc. as the mind plays tricks on you with completely normal grocery textures. Some of the best facial expressions and quotes come from that station. Luckily we were horribly over staffed (11 teachers) for only 10 kids at a time. It made the hours and hours of volunteering fun. Lots and lots of good news today: normally I try to leave such posts toward the end of the week but I will share it with my readers tomorrow.