School Observation day...

Saturday was school observation day, I think they have it on a Saturday so that the dads can go along too. First up was Japanese and we watched from the door for a while, I say door the school is open plan so the whole wall opens onto the corridor. You can just see round the edge of the door was decorated with pictures that the kids had drawn but we couldn't find Ebi-kun's. I figured he must have been sick the day that they had done it.

We got a bit bored of watching the lesson so we decided to have a look around the rest of the school, we got to see what other classes were up to. Had a sneak peek at the 6th graders doing English. Then we spotted this... Ebi-kun's picture was in a gallery near the library with a couple of other pictures from each grade, he hadn't told us this!

We went back to class to watch the ethics lesson, it was all about bullying and making the kids think about ways to handle a specific situation. Of course the bully in the class was arsing around and not paying any attention. Same kid who was carted off to the deputy head for biting Ebi-kun a couple of weeks back and has spent the day in the teacher office rather than the classroom for bad behaviour. From watching him, he is obviously disruptive in class but he also seems to need special attention. 

His parents weren't there and I have also seen him wandering the streets several time with no adult, sometimes with his little brother who is about 3. Makes you wonder what the whole story is, kind of feel sorry for him even if he is a pain.

One of the good things about Japanese school, is the amount of responsibly they put on the kids. This is the rota and school dinner information, they all have assigned jobs to do. They also have to clean the classroom and on specific days go and weed the grounds and clean up outside. I think this is one of the reasons why Japan is such a clean country, the kids are trained to do it from such an early age.

The last lesson was maths, Ebi-kun was an eager beaver, trying to answer all the questions and went up to the front twice to give his presentation. He has been complaining how morning maths is but he said recently it's not so bad because sensei asks him to do the explanations.

Once the lessons were over they started the autumn festival. There wasn't a great deal going on, they had some complicated system of buying tickets to buy food and games tickets. We decided not to get any food but Ebi-kun bought a couple of tickets to play some games.

Of course, due to Saturday being a school day, it meant that he was off school on Monday! So, we went and did some shopping, had a nice lunch and finished off by carving a pumpkin, not a bad day after all.