Preparing for Bunkasai

Izumi Bunkasai. Bunkasai is the school cultural festival that is held once a year. Each class is to make a banner and a big paper mache model. On the bunkasai weekend they do a big parade and the classes win prizes for the best model. The following day the have a big chorus competition. Everybody sings. A student even conducts the class. After that is finished, guess what they do to their lovely models? Anyone? Yes, the put them in a big pile a BURN them. I have been told that they do this as there is no space to store them. As you can see some of the banners and models are amazing. The are all designed and coordinated by the students. Every day for two weeks there are no classes in the afternoon. The students work on these projects. The models that are building are Stitch (Lilo and Stitch), Spongebob, Tigger, a drink vending machine (??) and many Japanese cartoon characters that I am slowly starting to recognise. It is all built of bamboo, tied together with plastic, paper mached and painted. The boy in the top left corner of the first photo is the coordinator of his class and is a very funny boy. Apparently he "loves me". The boy in the bottom left of that picture likes to be called "Johnny". Those two together make teaching this 3rd year class very enjoyable. The banner of this class is the girls posing with pink flowers in their hair. The banner is of Snow White, Cinderella and Ariel. It's simply amazing! The class painting the Sponge-Bob is really good too and this is only an 1st grade class. The group of five girls (peace-ing) are some of the ones that invite me out to play chasey and volleyball. The girl beign hugged on the left has told me she want to marry a foreigner! Anyway... I've probably gone on enough about this. The bunkasai is on the 5th and 6th of November.