nick-online  -

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Fancy Dress

We had (yet another) Halloween yesterday, this time at my base Elementary. I sometimes feel like a bit of a spoilsport by having the only remotely scary costume (this time a skeleton-zombie-pirate-thing, born out of a little too much time and freely available Posca markers). Ah well, cultural exchange and all that. Much more amusing though was having my boss there dressed as Peko-chan, which was apparently something of an internal battle - "When I was schoolgirl, I was very very tomboy, I didn't like to have ribbons or ANYthing in my hair". That and the fact that finally, after many years of negotiations and strategic bag-packing, we finally got the principal into the monkey suit.

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶A Rather Wooley Question

Got back to the office today to find a note on my desk: 'Nick-sensei, can you check the feelings worksheep?' Wrote back: 'Yes, he's feeling sa-a-a-d'. Like you could have resisted either.

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Who Am I?

L-R: Kat, Ben, Holly, Martin

We played the Forehead Game today. It's for doing 'Am I...?' 'Yes you are' / 'No you're not'. Basically, each student has a sheet with a set of names across the top, and a set of adjectives down the side, and where the columns and rows meet there's a o or x to denote whether that person is or is not that adjective. What you then do is get each student to pick a name at random, write it on a post-it note and stick it on the person next to them's head. The challenge is then of course to work out who you are by asking 'Am I tall?' 'Am I cute?' and so on. However, I discovered today the considerable additional entertainment to be had by putting all of your mates' names on the worksheet, thus giving you a whole classrooom of Junior High students with all your friends' names stuck on their heads. Bless. One thing however that did puzzle me was that for some reason, Martin's name caused untold amounts of giggling when I said it - does anyone know why? Is it the name or just how I say it? Has anyone else ever said 'Martin' in class in a nice, clipped BBC accent?

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Happy Halloween

Mwahahaha. Had Halloween with the 5th graders at Kagi last week. It was really good fun; usually we do Halloween parties with the younger kids, so it was nice to try some more grown up activites. By far the star game of the lesson was inspired by a favourite of my Dad's, Davey Jones' Locker. The legend of Davey Jones is actually hard to pin down - sometimes it's said that he was a pirate or sailor who drowned and came to be a euphanism for any drowned sailor, sometimes a fearsome pirate who like to make his victims walk the plank and drown, and even a third variant is that he is a sea demon of some kind, often spotted clinging to the mast or rigging on the eve of a ferocious storm. In any case, Davey Jones' Locker is a euphanism for the bottom of the sea, whether he sent sailors down there or ended up there himself. In the game of Davey Jones' Locker, the remains of such a drowned sailor have been recovered, and it's up to you to work out what they are. In the event, all this interesting backstory counted for bugger-all because to make it easier for the kids to understand and not confuse the americans we changed it to Witch's Soup instead. I was pretty impressed by what we came up with:

Eyes - peeled grapes
Tongue - konnyaku (a soft, jelly-like, rubbery slab made (god knows how) out of potato)
Finger - sausage with a chopstick through it (for the bone)
Brain - tofu
Blood Vessels - udon noodles in a little water

They were all placed in little black plastic bags and the kids had to squidge them and try and work out what they were, amid much squealing and freaking out. One even started crying (oops) when I told her that one of the bags had the real thing in it - come on, surely by age 11 you should be made of sterner stuff than that?