Suku Suku School: First Visit

Karuta!

This past Saturday International Club students participated in the annual Karuta tournament at the school. Karta (From the Portuguese carta, meaning, well, card) is a Japanese card game in which players try to match the first half of Japanese poems, read aloud by the MC, to the second half of the poems, written on cards and placed at random in front of the players. The player who finds the matching half of the poem wins the card and the player with the biggest stack of cards at the end of the game wins. It's not super difficult to play, but it is super difficult to explain so I'll just show you some pictures so you get the idea.

Picture 1:

Students gather around the cards

Picture 2:

The MC reads the first half of the poem

Picture 3:

When the student finds the card with the matching second half of the poem he/she grabs it

Back To School

Well, we're back at school as of early January but because of a few holidays and a ski trip the club didn't meet until this past week. This month we're focusing on two things. The first is our preparations for the Suku Suku School program, an afterschool program for elementary school students. We'll be joining the program once a month or so and playing English games, singing English songs, learning English words, etc... We can't wait to meet the kids and we're so excited to be working outside the school in the Edogawa Ward community.

The second thing we'll be focusing on is English Conversation classes for students thinking about studying abroad. As we've continued to make friends with schools and students from around the world (Australia, England, and now Poland!) our students have been dying to travel! So we've started meeting during lunch and after school to practice English and talk about conversation strategies. Today we had our first meeting and it was a lot of fun!