The Gotemba Minami ALT

Friday, 2 May 2014

hOppy easter!

Sunday, April 19th was Easter in America, so we had some Easter fun in English Club to celebrate the Holiday!

First, we played an egg relay game in the classroom. Since we were indoors, I told the students to be careful not to drop the eggs because if they did, there would be a big mess and they would have to it clean up! What I didn't tell them was that I had already hard-boiled all of the eggs so if (when) they did fall, it would be ok. The students, however, thought the eggs were raw! They were SO careful not to drop any of them!

The game went pretty well for the first 10 minutes until all of a sudden, a group of girls screamed and jumped back about 5 feet as an egg dropped to the ground off someone's spoon. They paused and there was silence for several seconds while they processed that their dropped egg hadn't splatter. We all laughed. They were so surprised!

After that, we all colored Easter Eggs! When all the eggs were colored, it look as if the Easter Bunny had visited, for sure! This was also the first time the new first year students joined us for Club. I think everyone had a good time in English Club for Easter!

Wednesday, 26 March 2014

GMBB!

On Sunday, March 23rd, the Gotemba Minami Brass Band Club held their annual concert. Which to me, was more like a HUGE production than just a "concert". It was amazing! It was not what I expected at all!

In America, when you go to an orchestra concert, the audience expects to sit still for about 2 hours, listening to classical music by students who are superglued to the floor with their instruments. It's very boring for everyone involved... both players and family/friends. Take it from me... I played the bass in an orchestra show once in high school. Notice I said, "once". 0_o

So, you can imagine my surprise when the GMBB Concert had a light show, Disney Princesses and Princes coming to life (in full costume), dancing Baseball Club members, comedy routines, a GMBBBoys Club, dancing, JPop Best and glow sticks. Not to mention the video montage to introduce all the members and the posters and pictures out in the lobby which made it all seem like one big family gathering.

I was also surprised to see so many students and teachers coming out to show support for their friends and fellow classmates. All the major clubs were there and I saw so many students. Even graduated students, and students from other schools. On a Sunday. The middle of a Sunday. This would never happen in America. I know... I've done countless years of School Choir productions. It's only ever the parents and grandparents that attend.

Japan never ceases to impress and amaze me. The more I'm here, the more I realize the rest of the world has a lot to learn from its example.

The Gotemba Minami Brass Band Concert was a great day. I can't wait for next year!

I don't have as many pictures as I would have liked. I found myself just enjoying the moment rather than focusing on taking pictures of everything. But, I hope you enjoy the pictures I do have :)

Why, yes, that would be a disco ball up there ;)

This is one of the posters from the lobby. It's the First Year's poster!

Even the curtain was amazing! haha :)

GMBBBoys Club!

You aren't seeing things. That's Aladdin with his lamp and the Genie!

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

The Great Postcard Exchange

We wanted to do a pen pal activity but with 205 students all writing a post card at once, the proper avenue was hard to come by. However, I managed to find "The Great Postcard Exchange" from doing a bit of online research. The Great Postcard Exchange was originally created by a librarian in Wisconsin in the USA in order to get library kids across the country writing postcards to each other discussing books and other reading related topics. I emailed the program director and long story short, Gotemba Minami Kookoo began writing postcards to kids in the US!

We got our first one back the day before our last class! It was sent to Keisuke in HR13! Everyone was pretty excited!

Funny faces ;)

Winter at GONAN

It has been one long and COLD winter here in Gotemba! On Valentine's weekend, we got 85cm of snow! That's 3 feet for all you metric system people. Over a month later there were still small piles of snow around town. It's been warm (Gotemba-warm) the passed two days so I think MAYBE all the snow is gone by now.

A friend and I visited the school the day after the snowfall.

So much snow, but Mt. Fuji sure looks beautiful!

You can't even tell there is a tennis court and a handball field under all this snow!

Clearly, you can see how happy I am to be shorter than a pile of snow... 0_o

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Christmas in 1D-land!

Santa's Elves visited 1D! No, not One Direction "1D", our classroom, 1D! The Elves decorated for Christmas! I guess you could say it was a Christmas 1-D-land! (Good joke, right?) ;)

The above picture is my somewhat successful attempt to shape some of the Christmas cards the students made into a Christmas Tree. It sort of works, right?!

Anyway, we had a few Christmas lessons, and then right before Christmas, we watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" so they could be both entertained (Snoopy is very popular here) and get some "true meaning of Christmas" insight from Linus. The girls loved this movie. I also showed some of Jim Carrey's, "The Grinch" to the students... the boys loved this one.

Thursday, 7 November 2013

Shizuoka Speech Contest Winner - Daichi Yaguchi!

On Sunday, October 27th in Shizuoka City, Daichi Yaguchi went home as the 5th place winner in the Annual Prefectural English Speech Contest! Daichi worked so hard on his speech entitled, "Think For Yourself". He spoke and sounded so well! We were all really proud of him. Good job to all who participated, and congratulations, Daichi!

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

Happy Halloween!

I know it's November and Halloween is technically over, but this is the first chance I have had to write in a while. Things have been busy lately, which is good!

I want to start off with saying that Halloween in the States feels very different than Halloween here in Japan. (It's better in Japan!) I stopped celebrating Halloween when I was around 15 years old (about all of my students' ages) and really haven't done much to acknowledge it since. Don't get me wrong, growing up I actually LOVED Halloween! All the candy, cute costumes and cool Disney Halloween cartoons and other shows that would come on TV were my favorite parts about Halloween! I loved going Trick-or-Treating with my little sister in costumes our Grandmother made for us, and then coming home to pour all of our candy and chocolates out onto the floor to make two huge piles! When you're a kid, that's the best! But somewhere along the way, the innocence that can be Halloween was stolen from me. I struggled with even acknowledging the day with my students, but I soon realized, it wasn't about me - it's about them, and Halloween was what I taught them it was. So, slightly reluctantly, I decided to revisit the childhood magic that is Halloween, for my students.

I don't have any children of my own yet, and this may sound silly, but I feel like I understand parents a little bit more now when they say things like "you can see holidays through your kids' eyes and suddenly it's like it's brand new again; like your experiencing it for the first time". That's not an exact quote, but that's the basic gist of it.

I had an idea from a fellow ALT friend of mine to get small costumes and set them on the kids' desks to find when they walk into class. So, I raided a couple 100 Yen shops and that's just what I did! The plan was to bribe them with candy so they would wear their costumes during class. (Although most kids really didn't need bribing). And, they had to say "Trick-or-Treat" to me at some point during the class in order to get candy. I'm sure their favorite part of the day was getting candy, but my favorite part was seeing and hearing their excitement as soon as they walked through the door. No one was expecting to have a witch's hat, a wizard's hat or bunny ears on their desk during class (to name a few). I think Halloween at Gotemba Minami may have actually been more fun for me than it was for them.

To sum it up, I want to thank my students for bringing the innocent magic back that is Halloween and I want to thank Japan (especially Disney) in general for making everything for Halloween so colorful, beautiful, cute and innocent.