Friday at Nakatsu Elementary: big beetles, the Tanabata Games

Nearly every Friday I teach at Nakatsu Elementary school. About a twenty minute drive (my furthest school) from the BOE, it is nestled in the mountains in the most picturesque settings out of the five schools I visit.

Today was my last time to teach the 5th and 6th graders, so I gave out English certificates and signed my name in the fast, scribbled manner that all Japanese kids seem to love. And then I stuck around for most of the rest of the day to join in on some of the excitement that was going down.

First off, to continue the brief beetle thread that I posted earlier, we had some huge foreign beetles brought in to the school for the kids to look at. Over the past few weeks, nearly every classroom has gained a class beetle for a pet. Some bigger than others, a few different species, they are all held and poked and made to fight each other. They are all large for my standards but in the larger beetle picture as I have now learned, they are rather chisai. The beetles brought into Nakatsu on Friday were from Brazil and another South American country and were absolutely huge. Big eyes, big pinchers (?), big bodies, big...And they are expensive, each starting at about $400. Unbelievable. The kids got to look at them for a while and then had a lecture about them, after which they were brought into the office where all the teachers got to get a good look at them too.

In addition to the beetle bonanza, the school celebrated Tanabata after lunch. Tanabata is a festival of sorts celebrated every July 7th. The celebration is held each year in honor of the star lovers, Orihime and Hikoboshi who are separated by the Milky Way and only allowed to meet once every year on this date. If it rains however, the lovers cannot meet and they must wait another year (unfortunately July seventh is still the rainy season, so I think it rains often on this day, as it did this year). Either way however, children decorate bamboo with tanzaku (wish tags), origami and other paper crafts. For a more in depth explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanabata.

In addition to the traditional celebration of Tanabata, the rokunensei (6th graders) organized a short puppet show to tell the story of Tanabata and a school-wide relay race (which I prefer to refer to as the Tanabata games). Teams mixed with all grades had to run around the gym, dribbling basketballs, weave through cones, shoot hoops, spin looking face down at a baseball bat and dodge swinging ropes (some with other students hanging from them). It was good fun, a nice change from the normal routine of cleaning after lunch.