Parents Sharing Day

We survived our Parents Sharing Day presentation at Catie’s school. Well mostly at least! I think we both need a couple hours of quiet to recover, but poor Andy has to go teach for the next three hours! I was not expecting so many parents to come to it, but there were a lot of other moms with their younger kids there too. Hopefully we didn't completely embarrass ourselves!

For our presentation, we brought in some fossils from home, did a short PowerPoint presentation talking about what a fossil is and what Indiana looks like today versus during the Ordovician ~450 million years ago, and then had the kids make "fossils" by pressing pinecones, leaves, feathers, plastic dinosaurs, etc. into clay. At the end we handed out directions to make a trilobite at home. Normally I wouldn't try to do a slide show for little kids, but I was worried about the language barrier and thought that lots of pictures would help get the point across. I suspect the most memorable part of the talk (other than seeing actual fossils) was learning that Indiana has skunks living there. The skunk photo was a big hit!

The kids were very good. I do not know how much they learned, but after a few moments of hesitation, they got really into the clay fossil-making activity. That said, I think I’m going to bring a couple of beers to share with the next unlucky set of parents after the next Parents Sharing Day :-)

Catie's class listening to my presentation. They are all in their art smocks because they were prepared to use their clay - "which of these things is not like the others?"

starting our fossil project

making fossils is serious work!

Catie & Anna putting some muscle into it!

Andy working with another table

preschool barely controlled chaos!

The shoe SOLUTION!

 This is unrelated to our presentation today, but I wanted to let you all know that we have solved Catie's shoe problem! It turns out that Japanese children's shoes are constructed quite differently than US shoes. They open further down- effectively opening in half, have the tongue sewn in on one side, and are MUCH EASIER to take off and put on. Getting Catie some (kind of ugly, but super cheap) Japanese sneakers has solved her shoe problems at school! The strawberry "crocs" are her pool shoes. On pool days, the kids have to change from their outdoor shoes to indoor shoes, which go on and off several times depending on what area of the classroom the kids are in, then into their pool shoes, back to indoor shoes (on & off a bit), and finally to go home they change into their outdoor shoes. The first day with her new shoes Catie was able to all that by herself!!!

Play areas and pinecones

On Sunday, we decided to explore the area under and around Morioka Station. Train stations in Japan are always full of good shopping and restaurants and this one proved no exception. We found a large imported food store where we were able to resupply Catie’s Skippy. For a child who rarely eats PB&J at home, she’s been pretty much living on peanut butter sandwiches since we arrived in Japan. It also sold such extravagances as premade graham cracker crusts and cereal! We didn’t buy anything else, but it’s nice to know it’s there. We ate lunch at McDonalds since there was no turning Catie away once she’d spied the golden arches. I’ve never felt the need to eat at a McDonalds in a foreign country before and it surprised me that the food tastes exactly the same. I even got my usual queasy stomach after eating it! That said, it really was a nice break from rice.

another delicacy in the basement of the eki- Catie now thinks Pop makes cream puffs!

We also headed across the street to check out the other open play area in town. It was pretty awesome! It is a bit more modern than Kokko and has a nice view of the mountains surrounding Morioka. As I was warned, there are a lot more babies there, so you have to be more careful playing. Catie had a blast playing with the trains and blocks. Now that she’s in school, I don’t know how much time we’ll spend there, but it’s nice to have another alternative for rainy weekends.

Catie & I both got warm welcomes from the other moms and kids at preschool this morning. I think she’s become a bit of a class mascot- she’s one of, if not the youngest student and the blonde curly hair makes her really stand out. From what I can discern, she’s doing pretty well. Eating lunch and changing her shoes a dozen times a day are problem areas, but she’s having fun during free time and appears to love science class. I guess she has been so enthusiastic about answering the teachers’ questions about textures (Friday) and things that float or sink (today) that she’s been jumping in when it isn’t her turn. She also likes the musical instruments, but so far refuses to sing with the other kids. We are supposed to be working with her on learning to take off and put on her shoes at home. Unfortunately, she had major hissy fits every time we tried to get her to put on her shoes this weekend (weird, since she's been doing this at home for months!). I’m going shopping with Yuki tomorrow and am going to look for a pair of fake Crocs that are easier to just step in and out of. Maybe that will end some of the shoe drama. The eating thing is also ridiculous and so not normal Catie. I think it will just work itself out in time, but right now it’s a little frustrating. Today she turned her nose up at my first attempt and cute bento- her favorite curry rice with carrot flowers all over the top. She ate about ½ a bite and then refused to eat the rest. Unfortunately someone interpreted the second box containing apples and almonds as dessert and didn’t give it to her, so she didn’t eat anything until she got home! Not good. I spoke with the school about it and think she’ll do better tomorrow (fingers crossed!) I’ve been meeting more moms everyday and enjoying hearing more about them and why they chose this school. I just wish I had more Japanese to actually be able to talk to some of them!

REJECTED!!!!!!

Andy taught his first class at Gandai today. I went with him to the university to eat lunch and hunt for some pinecones. This Thursday he & I have to teach a lesson at Catie’s school. Rather than go the US route and have the kids do show & tell, a different set of parents has to come in for “parents share day” each month. You can tell that all the parents dread their turn for Share Day from the all sympathy I’ve been receiving from the other moms. For my part, I just wish we’d known about this back in Indiana so we could have actually prepared something! Alas, we did not. We toyed around with talking about knitting and teaching the kids to finger knit, but since neither of us actually does this, we decided to stick with what we know and talk about fossils. We brought a couple of brachiopods from home, so we are going to focus on those and have the kids make “trace fossils” in clay and some cute paper trilobites. I knew there were some nice pinecones on the Gandai campus and was merrily collecting them in a bag when I looked up and found a professor staring at me. She wanted to know what I was doing. As soon as I explained about our planning a program on fossils for Catie’s yochien class, she got very enthusiastic and wanted to hear all about the activity. Instead of being in trouble, I ended up having a nice chat with her!

SICE Opening Ceremony

Today we attended the SICE Opening Ceremony. There were 80 or so people in a large auditorium in our local community center. Each table was for a specific junior high where the SICE students teach. Each student, their host family, and representatives from the host school sat in a group. And there were speeches. Oh, soooo, so many speeches. Speeches by the Morioka Board of Education, Iwate University professors, Morioka ALTs, all the SICE students, all the students’ families, all the students’ host schools, and then us. Poor Andy was effectively the keynote speaker and had to deliver a 5 minute long speech in Japanese! It was brutal, but he did a really good job. I thought that since Yuki had put Catie & I at our own table in the “kids section” in back near the door, I was safe from having to speak. Um, NO. I was completely unprepared and the only person in the entire room who didn’t speak in Japanese. I felt pretty silly, but luckily as the faculty spouse all I really needed to say was thank you for welcoming us to Morioka. This is the 4^th time I’ve had to give a little welcome speech since we got here. You would think I’d expect it by now, but they keep surprising me!

the SICE students on stage for their welcome speeches

Catie was really good for most of the ceremony. She burned through all the activities I’d brought about 2/3rds of the way through, but she was the only kid under 5 who wasn’t running around like crazy by then. Of course after the ceremony she ate 2.5 chocolate donuts and then was positively bouncing off the walls- sprinting all over the community center, spinning circles, and jumping on the couches. Lucky for us, that was not considered bad behavior, especially not after sitting (relatively) quietly for the whole ceremony. Instead everyone commented on how genki she was.

Catie's Thomas cards turned out to be a big hit for a lot of the children present

All in all, the ceremony went well. I think the students enjoyed having their team (family & school reps) surrounding them and it was important to see just how many people are involved with SICE. I knew that this was SICE’s 41^st year in Morioka, but it’s a little overwhelming to realize how big this program actually is here given how small it seems at Earlham. The Morioka public schools really rely on Earlham to provide their native English speaking teachers through SICE and ALT. As a result, it was an impressive gathering.