Oyuugikai

As I mentioned in the last post, last weekend was the pre-school “singing and dancing” festival. “Oyuugikai” literally means, “Dance party”. This annual event takes an amazing amount of patience and perseverance from the teachers, in my opinion. I can’t imagine anyone in the U.S. trying to teach a group of three-year olds dances, even if they are very simple. Each age group learned two dances; one was performed with all the boys and girls in that age group, and one with just boys (or just girls). The oldest class, Ridge’s class, also learned a third dance that was actually a bit complicated. The event finished with a group song, as you can see in this photo.
Pre-school students

Each “act” required some amount of costume change, which the mothers helped with. Most of the audience was comprised of grandparents, fathers, older siblings, and friends. Our situation was a little reversed. Aaron is much more laid back than me, so we decided it was better for him to be the one with the boys and helping them change into their costumes. I hung out in the back with the dads and manned the video camera. Here is the rack set up in a room off to the side where they hung all the costumes (each was labeled and arranged in order of appearance).
Costumes

Here is Holt, dressed in a costume resembling that of a popular animated hero on TV named “Rollpan-chan”. She is a character from the Anpan Man series (I wrote a blog entry a while back on him. Click here for a reminder. I explain him more in this post about Holt’s birthday blog link ).
Holt

Here is Ridge dressed in a traditionally-styled costume performing his “Yosakoi Soran” dance. It’s a traditional kind of dance with a modern twist that is very popular with adults. He really loved doing it and took it very seriously.
Ridge

We were really very proud of the boys and are still amazed that they did all the dancing right along with their Japanese friends!

I’m sorry that this blog entry isn’t as descriptive as usual. This is a very busy time of year for me. Between now and November 11th, I have no less than FIVE Halloween events to deal with and plan, two social parties I have to attend, an English contest I have to attend with a student next week, and a family portrait to try and arrange for Ridge and Holt. My English classes are all doing crafts now, so I have to do a lot of prep for that, too. I’m afraid I haven’t had much time for blogging.

Here's a picture we snapped today of the boys cuddling on the couch.