Apple, Blue, something and toes, knees and toes

Kindergartners, bless their little hearts, are awesome. I get to spend every Monday morning at one of two kindergartens in the Shinji area. My first go, this past Monday, was intense. After I got there and was escorted to a classroom with about 25 kids, who were a little taller than my knee caps, I was seated in a big circle with them all. Then everyone, including the three teachers, just sat and looked at me. I was told I needn't prepare anything since it was my first time. I was misinformed.

Cool.

So, to start off with I went around, shaking their little hands, and asked them they're names, giving them all a hi-fives and saying "nice to meet you".

Now what.

So....kids, all I really learned about these little creatures over the past month of seminar after seminar was keep them busy, and keep them active.

Ok.

So really, the first thing that popped into my head was, the ohh so beloved "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" song (HSKT from here on out). I knew from the beginning that I could only use this for about 5 minutes but man was I wrong. WAY wrong. Worry not that I only remembered the line including those four body parts. The "eyes and ears and mouth and nose", line failed my memory, so we just improvised. They loved it, but then what.

Ummm.

Fruit. I saw a plastic fruit basket. Picked it up and assigned all the kids to one of four fruits. So when that I called their fruit, they would run around and switch chairs. Great fun. Now sing the HSKT song, with fruit interjected sporadically, they lost it.

Ahhhhhh, ok. only 40 minutes left to go.

Colors. Now every time I taught them a new word I would say it and they would repeat it until there was at least something of a consensus among the mumbling. Since I had no flash cards to use as examples, I would point at things in the room and have kids stand up if they were wearing that color. The best part, was when the room provided no help, I would just pick a child who was wearing the color I needed, and hold them 3 feet off the ground. Yet again, they lost it. Soooo HSKT, with colors, with fruit.

It was still humid at that point so by now I'm drenched in sweat. On top of that, being that my crowd were 4-5 years old children, every once in a while one of those little monkeys would just run at me and start using me as a jungle gym. This is fun, but attention is lost very quickly when this happens.

So I sat down next to one of the teachers, and started to fan myself. Then she laughed and fanned me a bit.

(cue the light bulb)

Left and Right. This was probably a bit too difficult for my age group, but i was winging it. So we practiced left and right, which wound up sounding like "reft and light". Oh well....we incorporated this into the now HSKT song, but whenever I called out a "reft or light" they moved one chair in that direction and sat down. This caused chaos, with their teachers running around telling them in Japanese what the heck was going on.

So my time elapsed, and after I did another round of hi fives, and said sayonara......well, sayonara with these guys is the magic word. Somehow that was the cue for them to all rush me at once and either hug, climb on, grab, pet my arm hair until one by one the teachers pryed them off.

smile

As I left the room, then building and when I was riding away, they waved goodbye, and said goodbye the whole entire time. I cannot, CAN NOT, wait til my next kindergarten visit.

I'm sorry I have no pictures of this story...I could have killed myself when I realised I forgot my camera. This is a picture of a little girl who was in one of my summer camps, we ate lunch next to each other. She's a little older than my kindergartners but just as cute.