Livin' in the Inaka

Not much new to report, instead here are a few of my upcoming plans... Halloween Party - Seeing as this is the best American holiday ever, I figure I should make it the focus of my lessons for the next few weeks :D Not entirely of course, but I've been slipping in Halloween activities and vocabulary in between my normal lessons -for example, learning parts of the body and face by constructing differnet types of monsters :P Next week I'm going all out. On my scheduled day at Seibu we're going to have a party for the whole school in place of classes with games, costumes, and candy -- this is a big deal. Kids in Japan are not allowed to eat candy in school, EVER. But since Seibu is so small and my teachers are pretty chill there, they said they would make a cultural exception b(^-^) Yesterday I had all my 1st and 2nd graders make masks out of paper plates to bring to the party. Chubu is gunna be a bit harder to plan, since candy is a no-go and there are 402 more students ther

About this time of the year all the schools are having their annual school festival. Yesterday I attended Seibu Elementary's (the one in the mountains). The first part of the festival was musical performances by all the students in the gym. The whole school (all 27 of them) started with a song and a odd but cool vocal rhythm piece. Then each grade did their own song- 1st/2nd sang "Old McDonald Had a Farm" in Japanese, and the other grades performed Studio Ghibili songs on the recorder and piano. Pieces included the ending theme from "Spirited Away" and the main theme from "Princess Mononoke." For some reason I had to sit at the VIP table with a bunch of old guys in business suits. I would've rathered sat on the floor with the families and teachers but they had prepared special spots for us with boxed omiyage and programs : The 5th and 6th gd boys from the sports club performed a few stunts before we were let loose to explore the fair. The 2nd floor

This post has already been deleted by blogger twice now, and I'm feeling pretty discouraged... so I apologize if it seems rushed or incomplete. there's too many things going on to get into detail so I've decided to just focus on the big events. I've been pretty good about keeping my flickr gallery updated though, so check that for the current stuff. Recently I've been pretty stressed out about work. My first few weeks I had a lot of extra lessons to plan at my JHS on top of my weekly elementary school classes, and other English-related activities to plan as well. If that wasn't enough, my base school was chosen to host the annual English Teacher's Demonstration this year- and lucky me, my JTE and I got to be this year's star attraction. -skip this part if you're familiar with the JET program- Let me explain the role of the JTE and ALT, since it seems a lot of the readers of this blog aren't clear on what that is- Every junior high school and high