Bunkasai (Culture festival)
11/23
A school event I probably could have done without though there are those ALTs who swear this is the highlight of their year. Remember how there were classes cut everyday to make room for sports day prep? Well, it didn’t cease when sports day was over... after about a week of full six-period days, we were back to the old routine with one period left over for ‘class activities.’ Now the students were filling their time learning dances, skits and doing art projects, which would be presented in the culture festival.
I remember something like this in elementary school where we had to make poster boards individually or in groups about topics and stand in front of our poster boards during a presentation in the gym, so I thought their event would follow along the same lines. It didn’t. Each class group had their own presentation on the main stage (most did a skit) while everyone watched and enjoyed. Like the sports festival, all the teachers and parents were the audience while the students did everything from running the lighting and doing the sound effects to announcing the program and seating the guests. This might be a mostly picture entry since I did have difficulty understanding most of the plays and things (not only does the gym have bad acoustics but the kids didn’t use proper Japanese). My favorite was the 3rd year’s play - a drama about cops and candy and cross-dressers. I hadn’t even noticed half of the male students before until they showed up in mini-skirts and made themselves known in a whole new way to the entire student body.
Please enjoy a picture blog about this event :-). Love!!
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| 2nd year presentation about their trip to Kyoto |
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| 3rd years dancing |
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| They dropped him off the stretcher |
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| More dancing :-) |
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| Posing for peace |
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| One of my third year students dressed like a woman |
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| Lining up to sing |
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| The whole school |
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| Some art projects |
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| 1st year's play |
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| The cross dressing third years |
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| Empty auditorium |
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| The stage |
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| Winter presentations |
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| Calligraphy |
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| 2nd year newspapers about their trip |
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| More newspapers |
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| Lining up to bow |
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| Entrance to the gym |
This year we did our sports day and our cultural festival back to back. So we had 3 days of awesome (and much less class cutting)
ReplyDeleteI love those days tho! The students really love it and get so into it and there is so much more time for friendly chatter.
We do ours right before the 3rd grade students officially "retire" from thier club activites and get ready for entrance exams. Everyone works really hard to give them a nice last hurrah. Next year I hope to join in the teacher play!