Earlier this year we were honored to meet the Ethiopian ambassador to Japan and have dinner at his residence. We are hoping that at some point Kanto Daiichi is able to develop a sister-school connection with a high school in Ethiopia and the ambassador and his staff have been very gracious and helpful throughout the process.

In fact, they were kind enough to send us tickets to the Ethiopia Association of Japan’s annual event: Ethiopian Night of Music, Dance and Cuisine. Eric Sensei and two of our students went and had a great time dancing and eating (and eating and eating and eating!). We’re very grateful to our friends at the Ethiopian Embassy for letting us take part in such a fun event!

8 months later

Well, as those of you who read the blog have no doubt noticed, posting has been light (read: non-existent) since March. Obviously, the earthquake played a pretty big part in the initial drop-off and then we just got busy with other things and forgot to update in a timely manner.

Well, we're going to try to get back on track. In the coming weeks expect to see posts about the following:

Local Elementary School Visit
English Conversation Classes
Australian Students' Visit
Ethiopian Night of Dining and Dancing
British Students' Visit
Christmas Party

We'll try to put something up once a week so that friends and family can see what we've been up to. Thanks for you patience and we look forward to your comments.

KDI

Earthquake

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we're doing okay. There's just no way to know from day to day what part of our lives will be effected by the damage from the quake and speculating would be irresponsible. So we'd just ask everyone to keep Japan in your thoughts, especially those people in the north directly effected by the quake and tsunami.

The Red Cross always needs blood. Now would be a good time to give.

Visitors from Poland!

This past Tuesday we were lucky to host a dance group from Poland. They're here for a competition in Edogawa but they came by in the afternoon and joined us for some Japanese crafts and cooking. They tried their hand at origami and they cooked shiratama, a traditional Japanese sweet made from rice flower.

Everything turned out great and the students had a wonderful time meeting each other. The wonderful thing about a second language is that it doesn't limit you only to communicating with native speakers of that language, but also allows you to interact with anyone who's studied the same language. We were happy that our students had a chance to speak English with our guests from Poland and hopefully their world view has expanded that much more.

Big thanks to the cooking club for taking the time to teach us how to make such delicious food!!

Student Movie Presentation

Some of our students were asked to create short summaries of their favorite movies. The results were really creative and fun. Here's one:

Cinderella

Once upon a time there was a girl, Cinderella.















She lived with step-mother and three sisters.
They were bullies.

One night, good witch appeared and put magic on her.

Witch cast a spell. “Chi-chin-pui-pui-no-pui!”

Cinderella became a princess.

At last, she was taken to the ball and met the prince.











She was dancing with the prince merrily. But it was time that the magic would not work.

When she was running one of her slippers fell off.

The prince picked it up.

One day, the prince visited the village where Cinderella lived.

Checking all the ladies. No one could put on the slipper.

At last, he went to Cinderella’s house and he found the slipper fit Cinderella!!

The prince said, “You are my destiny!” They lived happily ever after.

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!