Halloween!!!!!!

I've had a ton of Halloween lessons and activities going on this past week! It's been wild fun, but wicked exhausting!

Japan doesn't really celebrate Halloween. They know what it is, but don't do anything special for it besides maybe a little decoration. Therefore, I decided to bring Halloween to them at school.

First I had halloween lessons with my preschools. They are sooo adorable! Like last year, I had one class make cat masks and we took a group picture. For the other classes, we learned words like "Black Cat", "Pumpkin", "Ghost", etc. and played various games. So fun!




For elementary school, I wore my Tinker Bell outfit to school for the whole day. I can't tell you how many teachers and kids I surprised. The looks on their faces were pretty priceless! During class, I did a powerpoint presentation about Halloween in America. Then we played games.

The first game involved putting your hand in black mystery boxes, which had different "body parts" inside. Of course, they weren't really body parts, but different food items with the same texture as follows:

eye balls- round taro (sato imo)
tongue- devils tongue (konyaku)
ears- bamboo shoots (take no ko)
fingers- sausages
toes- ginko nuts (ginan)
hair- bean noodles (haru same)
nose- jello (konyaku zeri)

The kids were pretty grossed out touching them. They had to guess what the body parts really were and write their guesses down. Some of them had a pretty difficult time guessing!



The second game was a toilet paper mummy wrapping contest. First team to finish wrapping a mummy won. Got some great pictures this way!



On Friday I went trick or treating with a bunch of cute little kids dressed up as witches and pumpkins. Since Japan doesn't really do trick or treating, the instructor of a private English tutoring school organized a trick or treating route to a bunch of stores along a road in Hitoyoshi. Each store gave a package of treats to the kids for them to divide before they went home. It was a nice idea, but the road chosen was way too busy with cars! I spent half the time fearing one of the kids was going to get run over. But the kids got a lot of treats to bring home, so I'm glad I got to help out. I was the only one who wasn't in a witch costume:P

After the trick or treating event, I went to a Halloween party at Amanda's house. It was pretty fun, but I was sooo exhausted the next day. I really don't like staying up all night!