Halloween is over.

Yeah, for me it is. This week was the week to give kids their "special lesson" on Halloween, and then, on Sunday, we had our school Halloween party. This was highly entertaining, since it was my first official work party, and it was all for the children. I believe a total of twenty-nine kids showed up, and I was pretty much put in charge of the ones ages 7+, of which there were about eighteen. Now, my room is pretty small, and I consider it somewhat miraculous that I got all eighteen of them in there without much damage done. Half of them were my students, the other half belonged to Benni-sensei, who had all the younger kids. She had them in the bigger activity room, but they made way more noise and a bigger mess than my group did.




Obviously, the school couldn't afford to give pumpkins to every single kid, so we had little oranges (mikans) to give to them. The ones that got to the party early were put to work drawing faces on them. They turned out pretty cute. The two boys in the picture are my students; the girls are Benni-sensei's.



Some of the kids came in costume. The first pic is Rio (not to be confused with Ryo, who is sitting next to her), my 4-year old private lesson student. As you can guess, she LOVES Disney Princesses and is absolutely adorable - sounds like someone else I know, hmm? (yeah, I'm talking about Cyra, except Rio is cute in Japanese AND English, ha ha). She's a very bright little girl, and her mother wants her to learn to read English so she can get into an international school next year. The bottom picture shows Nene and Ayuka, also my students.



The lady with the guitar is Benni-sensei. She is very talented when it comes to music, and she wanted to teach the kids a Halloween song, and it took me a while to convince her that there really wasn't a song that would be easy for non-native kids to learn. She finally settled on "You Are My Sunshine."



I was instructed to give a Halloween lesson for about twenty minutes, and I had no idea what to do with 18 kids in that time span, so I settled on having them draw. I got them to do both pumpkins and ghosts, and then I had them do a word find that was too difficult for some of them, but they seemed to enjoy it. They all stayed on task, and they cleaned up the whole mess afterward (it was astounding, I blinked, and the next thing I knew, the table was clear and the kids were gone).

The girl in the last picture is Arisa, one of my shyer students. She's a very good artist, so I wanted to make sure I got her ghost in a picture. Behind her, hunched over his ghost (who has hands and is wearing a suit and glasses) is Yuudai, who is easily one of my best students and is quite fun besides.



After the "lesson," Benni-sensei led the whole group to two of our neighboring businesses for pre-arranged trick-or-treating. The first was a flower shop (Floralies), the second a drug store (Marue, which we go to frequently anyway, sometimes once a day). This attracted quite a few stares and kept us adults on our toes because some of the younger kids don't have full awareness of their surroundings yet. Plus, pedestrians don't appear to have automatic right-of-way in Japan, even if they're a pack of thirty or so kids.


The kids were all brought back safe and sound, fortunately, and they were promptly fed sandwiches. That went rather smoothly, considering we had a total of about forty people crammed into the activity room and stuffing their faces. Then, everyone was brought back out to the lobby area and there was a gift exchange. I'm told that Japanese people love to give gifts, which is the only explanation I can come up with as to why a gift exchange was planned into a Halloween party. But it made everyone happy, and who can argue with something that makes people happy?

Finally, costume prizes were handed out (all three to young kids, I noticed; Hitomi-san looked a little wide-eyed when Benni-sensei asked her to judge), pictures were taken, and then the children were released to their rapidly-arriving parents.

All in all, it was quite fun. We made it through without incident, which I consider a pretty good success. The only fit thrown was by one of the student's year-old brother, who by the end of the night was sick and tired of being held by anyone who get could their hands on him. He was dressed as a little bunny and was pretty darn cute all right, but even he was done with by the end of the night. Can't say I blame him.

So, the next party will probably be a Christmas party in December. Japanese people don't celebrate Christmas, but this is an English-speaking school, so it follows English-speaking holidays (Easter is also on the calendar). That, I'm thinking, should also be a fairly entertaining evening.