School Christmas

School has been super busy as per usual but I feel like it will slow down for at least a month. Report cards are over, Syllabus (3 month planning for my 6 elementary classes) is over, and I have almost finished finding/ editing a play for my kindergartens. A play you ask? GAWD yeah! Instead of a Christmas Concert our kindergartens will present a 15 minute skit/songs for their parents! So I have been trying to find a play that will work with music. I found a “Stone Soup“ type of skit only the characters are forest animals which will be cute for the parents right? I then lucked out and found a song to teach them to perform too. At this point I feel like it is all coming together and that I pretty much rock.... and then I had the students pick which animals they wanted to be... at this point it all goes downhill because everyone wants to be the rabbit (this class thinks they are the cutest animal) and there is tears and fighting--- it is all a mess. So now I sit on my Christmas break trying desperately to change the forest animals into cute cuddly creatures! It is so bad that in order to have the girl with the best English skills be the narrator, we will no longer have her as the owl (which is originally scripted) but as a “Beautiful Princess.” (my korean teaching partner’s idea--- and ohh so very Korean---which she promised to the child behind my back--- I guess in the long run it really doesn’t matter though hey?)...... Ohhh BROTHER!

So School Christmas.... I tried my best to take to the max. The school didn’t do much but I made a Christmas tree out of paper for both of my classrooms. I then had the kindergartens trace their hands and put their names on it (think green fur leaves) and then we made coloured paper decorations and “decorated our tree” to Christmas Music. So alas I did have a Christmas tree too!
The only other Christmasy thing we did besides (my morning messages, colouring pictures, and music) was our field trip to “Santa Village.” This was an interesting place. It was a spin off of the huge English Villages they have around Korea. An English Village is basically an American City transported to Korea where Korean students arrive almost for a camp like experience. They get their passports stamped and then they “travel around” and do lessons/ activities in buildings that are fashioned as one would see in Canada or America. The place we went to for this particular field trip was the same idea only much smaller.... so small it was tucked away into a huge train station! It was a really nice place consisting of two hallways of pretend (think elaborate playhouse style) shops- like the candy store, supermarket, church, doctor’s office, fire house, jail, --- Honestly it was a place I dreamed of being able to play in as a child! So our students were taken by the foreign teachers (who work at this place)... so we were free to run around and take pictures--- hence their ridiculousness.
The students also got presents sent to the school by their parents... and then we took them to the place to have Santa give them to each of the students. This is a nice idea in theory but Santa was not so good. He was a young punk who I think had too much Soju the night before and was just rambling (but it was English so the students didn’t understand his awkward jokes... but I didn’t appreciate it). No harm was done though and the students liked it besides being extremely bored while they waited for the other 200 hundred kids to do pictures and get their presents!--- All and all a fun but completely disorganized Korean Field trip!