Three 90 minute kids parties in the space of 5.5 hours in Hibarigaoka school yesterday left me feeling exhausted. I should have known better really but when asked a while back I was more than happy to team-up again with colleague and friend Lai-Keun following our Kung-Fu Panda party success back in August.

All three lessons followed a similar pattern with differing levels of success which is not to say that any were awful or even bad but the first party of very young kindergarten students did have a few problems such as students coming late and a couple of cry babies who just wouldn’t part from their mums. Inevitably they needed a bit more help, support and direction from the Japanese staff but it went quite well given the number of kids in the group which was way more than an average class in our school.

Whilst it took us a bit of time to find our feet in the first one (and it seemed to last hours in my mind!) the second and third ones flew by particularly the second KG class where and all-but-one kid was dressed up. As well as the more standard activities like chain drills, stations, hide and reveal, hunt the flashcard, race and draw we (I say ‘we‘ but Lai-Keun was the one who actually came up with most of the activities featured!) also did:

* pumpkin bowling with character bottles replacing skittles

* ‘hit the pinata’ which when broken exploded with candy for the students to grab

* throwing mini-pumpkins through the eyes, nose and mouth of a huge cardboard pumpkin

* stick the tail on the witches cat

* ‘Mummy wrap’ where one member of each team is wrapped up like a mummy using toilet roll

There was also a craft activity or two in each with pumpkin plates being made in the first two kindergarten groups where the kids just had to stick the facial parts on the orange pumpkin plate. The first also raced to stick the lexical items on a couple of ‘haunted house’ posters and the final elementary group made a vampire or bat toy thing using a toilet roll. Long running Childrens BBC programme ‘Blue Peter’ would be proud of such an activity though this one would have taken up a whole show!