Hi, everyone! Sorry that I disappeared for a bit. My laptop battery died, so I didn't have very much internet access until I could get a new battery shipped from America. Now that I have my new battery, I can start updating again.

I hadn't started teaching the last time I'd updated. Now, I've been teaching classes for a bit over two weeks. Like all things, it took a bit of getting used to, but I enjoy it. My students are good, though I feel like I'm still learning how to best connect with them. Many of them are excited to meet me, but some of them also seem intimidated by me because I speak English. Speaking English is a very intimidating prospect to most Japanese students, so it's my job to try and get them to speak as much English as possible. This can be difficult when the students are afraid to speak English because they're afraid of making mistakes. The whole thing is very much a learning experience and it keeps my workdays quite busy. Lesson planning for my classes keeps my workdays quite busy, too. As an ALT, it's my job to plan effective lessons for myself and my Japanese co-teachers to teach. I started off with a self introduction lesson, so that the students can learn about me. At this point, between all three of my schools, I'd estimate that I've given my self into lesson about 18 times...and I still have to give it another 7 times.

The first weekend of this month was my main school's culture festival (also known as bunkasai). During the culture festival the school is opened to the public. The culture festival is an event for the students to show the local community what they've been doing in their extracurricular activities and it's also an opportunity for the students to just have fun. The students spend a lot of time preparing for the festival. I'd seen them working on festival preparations since shortly after I first arrived at the school in July. The whole school was decorated by the students. The homeroom classes in each grade all decorate their classrooms, each room with a different theme. This year's festival theme at our school was movies, so each class chose a popular movie (such as Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, or Alice in Wonderland) for their classroom's theme. They then go all out with decorating. Each room either sells food or has some sort of games for people to play. There were also a few different rooms that the students made into haunted houses (of course, these rooms were very popular). The festival is also an opportunity for the cultural clubs to show what they've been doing in their meetings. Groups such as the band, dance team, baton club, and tea ceremony club all put on performances during the festival. The photography, art, calligraphy, and astronomy clubs also all had rooms to display their work.

That weekend was basically the best days of work I've had so far because it wasn't actually work. I got paid to attend the school festival, eat food, play games, watch performances, and talk with the students. One of my favorite rooms was the Harry Potter themed room. The students decorated the outside of the room like Platform 9 3/4 and the inside like the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Inside the room the students sold yakisoba (type of Japanese noodle dish). There were four tables set up, one for each Hogwarts house. Before giving each customer their food, the students would put the Sorting Hat on their head and sort them into a house. I was amused when the students decided to sort me into Hufflepuff. One of my other favorite parts of the weekend was going to the tea ceremony club's tea ceremony/koto performance. The koto is a traditional stringed Japanese instrument. (Here's a video of koto playing, in case you're curious.)

Here's a few pictures that I uploaded from the festival. I have more, but I'm not posting them because they have my students in them. (I don't think it's kosher to post photos of my students online without their permission.) I feel like the few pictures that I can post don't quite do the festival (or the amount of work that the kids put into it) justice. It was a fun weekend!