Calgary Home Stay Practices

As I said in the last post, I am working Saturday afternoons now.  Why? 

There are 18 students, 2 teachers, 1 principal, and 1 ALT (me!) who are going to Calgary in March to experience Canadian culture.  The students are going to stay with a number of Calgarian home stay families and go to a Calgary school with their home stay buddies.  At the school, the Japanese students are expected to give a large demonstration to the entire school/community population and small, classroom demonstrations within the school.  These demonstrations will demonstrate Japanese culture to the Calgary students. 

So on Saturdays leading up to March, the students are preparing these demonstrations.  I am there to assist them and to help them.  

We first had a meeting in late January with all of the parents, teachers, principals, and the Tarui school board members.  Here are some pictures I got that night.

I'm sitting at the front and I quickly took this picture before the meeting began:

After the meeting, we all stood for a group photo:

 Here are the parents, teachers, and students socializing before leaving:

This is a picture of the adults going on the trip:

And finally, here is a picture of some of the hard-working people who work at the Tarui School Board:

On Saturday, January 28th, we had our first practice.  Here are some pictures of that day.

Now, they showed a power point with a couple of pictures of the 2010 Japanese students presenting their small group demonstrations.  And guess what?  The pictures in the power point presentation were from my Calgary school with my old Canadian students!  I nearly died!  These students were in grade 7 in the picture, but I know they are currently in grade 9.  I took a photo of the power point picture.  I couldn’t resist!

So far we’ve had a four practices and we only have three more to go before we leave for Calgary.  I look forward to these practices and I really look forward to going to Calgary and Banff and experiencing my hometown through the eyes of my Japanese students.  I’ll be sure to post more pictures at another time to keep you posted…

The students are practicing a song in this picture.