Photo Challenge Day 10

March 10: Time

Today was the Junior High’s Graduation day. What happened? Just the other day these kids were 6th graders and now they’re graduation from Junior High?? How did that happen?

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Despite the fact that it was long and the vocabulary for something like graduation is difficult. It was fun to get to watch this group of kids graduate from junior high school.

Here are some of the fun things that happen at my junior high school for graduation.

When all the visitors come to the school, they take off their shoes. Since people can’t wear shoes in Japanese school buildings, they put their outside shoes on a tarp and either wear the shoes they brought or the slippers provided by the school.

 

In Japan, special “dignitaries” are invited to school ceremonies. My friend and school office lady, K, waits for the dignitaries to come. The dignitaries are people like the mayor, the other school principals, the head of the PTA and other important people. Sometimes I’m one of them – I always much prefer to be a regular audience member though. Before the ceremony, they wait in the Principal’s office and speak in difficult Japanese.

The kids create massive amounts of these tissue paper flowers and use them to decorate the school.

This wall says “Thank You.”

The students’ recent science projects are on display here.

Before graduation there’s a special room for the parents to wait in while the kids have homeroom, and a few other things to do.

If there’s a space with not much happening, it was decorated.

This says “Omedeto” it means “Congratulations.”

The graduating students (I think) write letters to their classmates and maybe their families.

This is the stage. The sign across the top says something like “Congratulations on your Graduation.” The flags below are for Hokkaido, Japan, and my town. When someone goes on stage, they bow to the Japanese flag. The trees in the back are made up of a ton of tiny Cherry Blossom cutouts.

The line of video cameras. These people also come out at every ceremony or school festival.

After the students have walked the stage, speeches are given.

First, the principal.

Next, a representative from the Board of Education.

After that, the mayor.

Last, the head of the PTA.

After they spoke, the students sang a couple of songs.

After that, it was party time. This was my place marker.

The party was fun. There was of course, lunch. After that it was animal bingo – I was one of several winners.

After bingo, we played the telephone game. My team didn’t win, but one of the rounds I passed on what I had heard correctly and the next time, I was probably the weak link in the chain. It’s soo hard to play the telephone game in your second language. Now I kind of know how my kids feel – they’re usually playing with each other and words they know. I was playing with a bunch of things I had no clue about.

The weather was terrible, so as we cleared our cars, my new-this-year JTE and I had a nice chat about winter in Japan vs. Portland.

Photo Challenge Day 9

March 9: Sweet Tooth

This was the dessert we got after our delicious lunch. I had tea and some kind of pound cake.

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Today I spent the day boarding with friends in Tomamu. I’m getting so much more confident with my turns, I started doing turns on the steeper bits of the hill and faster on the lower bits.

Of course, going faster sometimes means falling a bit more. I was trying to catch up to a friend who had fallen down and managed to catch my board on another friend’s board. I tipped, and was still moving as I fell.  I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly I found myself sliding down the hill head first, body just following a long as though I was on a slide. The whole thing didn’t hurt at all and was more funny than anything else. I finally managed to stop by spreading my limbs out and hoping the surface area would slow me down. It did. (Mom, dad and grandma: It was a bit of a surprise, but I was fine and I had my helmet on) 

We had lunch in a cute little café near the hill. It turned out, my students’ parents were working in the café.

We boarded and boarded until almost 5:30, when everyone had plans in different directions.

On our second to last run of the day, I captured this:

After our boarding adventures finished, I headed back to town, to put on dry clothes, and head out to the earthquake tribute my town was having. I met up with a couple of other friends there.

They lit up one of the runs on the ski hill with a kanji. I’m not sure of the reading, I had it explained really well to me last year. But it seems to mean bond, emotional tie, a relationship or connection.

After that they set off the fireworks.

This is how my tiny town, does a tribute to the victims of the Tohoku Earthquake.

All in all, it was a fun filled day with a few different sets of friends.

Photo Challenge Day 8

March 8: Leap

This is photo challenge fail day. I had the leap idea. I wanted to set the flash behind me and light the background and not me. Now that I’ve tried it, I’ve got an idea of how I could do it next time for better results.

The failed photos: 1. Totally out of focus, using the remote. 2. The shutter speed was too fast for the flash, only a portion of the sensor was even exposed while the flash was firing. 3. One of the many jump shots where I only managed to get part of myself in the frame. 4. An interesting portrait that ended up being lit by the flash behind me (all white walls work pretty well as reflectors to get the light back down on me.

The gear:

What I used to take these shots: Nikon D5100, a speed light, a super cheap tripod, a remote and a wireless flash trigger (one part for the camera and one part for the flash).

I think, to take this picture again, I’d find a white sheet and hang it, light it from one side and have me jump on the other. I also might need a bigger space.

All in all, it was good because I haven’t experimented with the flash very much since I bought it. I really like the way the lighting in the picture on the bottom right turned out.

I took a ton of pictures, I suspect that anyone who could see the flash going off again and again in my window thought I was nuts.

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Today was the last day the 3rd year students were around before Graduation. They first and second year students planned some fun games to play and a video. The video started with all the commercials the kids had recorded for school festivals. Things like a beer commercial (with the commercial in the bottom left) and the kids acting it out using school milk. The majority of the video was pictures of them over their 3 years of JHS. I’ll be sad to not see these kids all the time anymore.

Photo Challenge Day 7

March 7: Key

Not really a key, but I was feeling a tad unsure about posting my own key on the internet. Can creepers design a copy?

This one reminded me a little of the doorknob in Alice in Wonderland.

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That’s all for today. I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.

Photo Challenge Day 6

March 6: Straight

Today I finished and sent my taxes straight to the paper wasters (aka. the IRS). Yay for not having to keep thinking about them after this. I love the cute stamps in Japan, for Valentine’s Day they had super cute Disney stamps.

Here’s the answer to Day 4’s challenge:

It’s a crochet hook. Mom (on the blog site) and Mandie (on Facebook) got it.

In other news I got the HNg (Hokkaido Newcommers Guide) for this year. Guess whose photo is on the front?

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Today was the last day of elementary school classes. I still am slightly in shock that this year’s students were third graders when I came and in less than a month they’ll be starting Junior High School. Time flies so quickly!

It was also my last ES class teaching with Mr. I. It was a lot of fun teaching with the same teacher for all of the classes. In part, because we had time to talk and change lessons as we wanted to. He was also always super receptive to my ideas for the ES English classes, which as a trained ES teacher, made me super happy.

Just because I’m still in awe of how much snow Niseko has every year, here is a picture of the Niseko snow this weekend. Wow!

Photo Challenge Day 5

March 5: #widn (what I’m doing now)

What I’m doing now seems like a bit of a cheater topic . . . there were a lot of ‘now’s in my day and obviously now I’m blogging.

On Friday at the school snow festival, I met a bunch of people who are my age and all like snowboarding. We decided we should go boarding together, so that’s what I did this evening.

The top 3 pictures are from boarding. The big one is the group I was boarding with. The top right was the view from the ski hill. The middle is an obvious sign of getting more comfortable with all of this – I took my phone out and took a picture, on the lift!

The bottom 3 are from dinner after wards (at about 9 pm). The far left is potato & cheese mochi – yum! The middle is the girls I got to have dinner with (the one guy in our group had to leave before dinner). And the bottom right was dinner’s main course – Ochazuke.

Ochazuke is a bowl of rice with soup poured on top and topped with various toppings. This one had octopus, wasabi, nori and sesame seeds on top. Yum!

As for yesterday’s mystery picture, since no one was even close, I’m giving you all another day to figure out what it is before I reveal it.

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Even before snowboarding and dinner, it was a fun filled day. 

I got to teach the first and second year students at the JHS and the more comfortable with this job I get, the more fun both the students and I have. I also had an elementary visit with the school whose festival I went to on Friday. That was fun both because the kids are awesome and it meant a ride in the car with a JTE who also loves photography and has a super old all manual Nikon. We had fun chatting about cameras on our way to school. 

The afternoon brought taxes. I almost forgot the darn things this year. Filing US taxes when I don't have to pay them seems like such a waste of time and paper. I got the form 2555-ez finished. The hardest part of that was a minor shock when I realized how close I had come to being in the US for more than 36 days this year - I thought I was going to have to look at alternative beginning and end dates until I realized I had totally mis-calclulated the time I was at home before New Years. Tomorrow I'll do the 1040 and then they'll be off! 

Photo Challenge Day 4

March 4: Out of Focus

I’ve been using this a lot recently for a project I’m working on.

What do you think it is? (comment at the bottom!)

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Today I had a busy, but really fun day.

It started with my last trip to one of my favorite schools for this school year. With the fifth graders we played English Mario Kart and then had a color guessing game. For the sixth grade, my JTE had the kids making posters for their school. For the first to fourth graders it was review day that I totally forgot about because I never teach them on Mondays (luckily I realized this before I left the house this am and was able to start thinking about what to do before I arrived). We did an animal review with a story book, some drawing and then finally played English Mario Kart as well.

After that, I returned to the main part of town for Eikaiwa planning and lunch with the JHS first years. They are a great bunch of kids and the more Japanese I can speak, the easier it is to keep up with lunch time conversation.

When lunch was over, I headed back out to the elementary school for a concert they were having. They had a brass band from Furano come to visit and play (they also played a bit). I always love getting to do something non-English with my kids and get to see the things they are good at – lots of them find English really, really tough.

While I visited, I found this lovely “English” patch on one of my students’ tee shirts. That button on the left is very emotional!