It was the first of my Hallowe'en Party classes. We had fun. I am a Pretty, Pretty Faerie Princess. I have sparkly pink wings and a pink and silver crown and pink ribbons in my hair and sparkly pink glitter all over my face and sparkly silver stars around my eyes and a frilly puffy white skirt. It's exactly what Hallowe'en is to me, dressing up as something scary that you're not. That much pink is a whole lot of scary. But it's fun and I'm enjoying it. It makes me feel girly, something that is quite foreign to me. Not that I don't feel like a girl, I do, I just usually feel like a girl who can kick some serious petootie and look dead sexy doing it. Girly is a whole other ball game. Japan is all about girly. Even the men are girly. It's wrong that most young guys, we're talking High School to mid-twenties, have bigger hair than I do. That said, I'm so far enjoying this week. It feels like it will go really fast. That's something I'm looking forward to.
My first class was a playgroup with some 2 and 3 year olds and their mums. They were all pretty cute. They didn't really care about what we did as long as they were looking cute in their costumes. Unfortunately one of the little girls hadn't been to class since 3 weeks ago so she didn't know about the party...means no costume. We made tissue ghosts and threw them into buckets with pictures of spiders and candy and such. Then we had ghost races where we tried to blow our ghosts down a table. It would have helped if we all could have been as tall as the table, that made life a little difficult. We read some stories about a monster and some kids trick or treating. We cut out our hands to make a scary spider with great big eyes, mums had to help with the scissors. We danced around looking like our fabulous selves. I tried to teach them to Trick or Treat, but it didn't really work.
My next kids class, there was an adult class in between, has only one student so we joined another class that's just a little bit older. There's seven kids in that class. They're all about 5, my student is 4. It was a little bit different from the usual quiet room with only the two of us to do whatever we feel like. She did great. We played a lot of the same games only a bit different as the last class. We also tried to play a freeze game where they jump from pumpkin face to pumpkin face on one foot then freeze when the music stops. Problem is that they're Japanese kids and are far to innately ordered to go ahead of each other so no one moved for the first 20 seconds of the game and they all just stood there on their pumpkins staring at the pumpkin faces below them. It was a winner game. The other teacher and I thought it was a bust but they absolutely loved it, waiting forever for "their turn" to step on the pumpkin in front of them. They got Trick or Treat a little bit better. I stood outside the class and they knocked on the door from the inside. I opened it, they all yelled "Timaty" or "Tikaleet" or just "Kah-teet" and I gave them candy.
Next were my boys. Yes, this is Kenichi and his cohorts, Hiroyuki and Takahiro. I love this class. They're such boys. I changed some of the games a bit. We still made ghosts but the buckets were further away and they pretty much just ended up tossing them about the place and punching each other as they raced to pick up their ghost. The ghost race went way better, seeing that they can actually see over the table. We played another game, Make a Monster, where they draw a body part that corresponds to the number on the dice that I roll. For example, I roll a 1, they draw an eye. I roll a 3, they draw an arm. I roll a six, they draw a horn. And so on until we have about 14 eyes, several long thin appendages that are supposed to be either arms or legs, about 7 ears and more mouths than I can remember. It was great fun. I'll do it differently for the rest of the week depending on the size of the class. If I have enough kids then we'll do it in teams and they'll go for a certain amount of time. We also played Pictionary where they draw Hallowe'en items and the others guess. It pretty much just meant them looking through the cards and punching each other as they fought over the whiteboard markers. They fully got the Trick or Treat thing even though they still didn't get the words right. Whatever. Give'm candy.
