The Last Halloween

Well, we had our final To- O Gijuku English Club Halloween party, and at least we can say we went out with a bang! We "bribed" the students into wearing costumes with a bag full of candy-goodies for 1st and 2nd place and a $5 gift card to McDonalds and $5 gift card to Baskin Robbins for the 1st place winner! They must have really wanted those gift cards because everyone turned up in a costume, with many of them being homemade (including a wolf and Disney Halloween Mickey)!! One of our students even made her Halloween costume the night before while listening to Christmas music- now that's the spirit :D




And, we had the traditional game of "Bobbing for Apples" with a twist. Each apple had a challenge on it, and the teams fought for candies!

Of course a Halloween party wouldn't be complete without some scarecrows, so we did a scarecrow relay race with a student from each team as the scarecrow! We have to admit that they were some rather stylish scarecrows!

And, this year we decided to add in a boot stomp contest, as this was one of Angie's favorite activities that she remembers from her childhood days. It was rather chaotic and wild, but definitely a blast! After the boot stomp we had a scary-treasure hunt, in which the students could only use flashlights (the party was at night so most of the lights in the school were off) to find the clues to the final treasure of candy! Our students absolutely hate going through the school at night in fear of the ghost that haunts the school, so of course we made sure to put some of the hints in dark, secluded places! One of the teams had to sing a song to keep their spirits up as they went down the dark stairs to the kendo room for one of their clues.

Finally, to top off the night we did the traditional "pumpkin" carving or as close as you can get to pumpkin carving in Japan. We were very happy to finish our third and final Halloween party with all of our fingers and no loss of blood! We must admit that, although we had a great time at the party, we were rather sad at the same time as we realized this was the last Halloween party we'd get to have with our students. We're on the verge of 150 days (TOMORROW!) and are starting to feel the sadness set in as we come closer to saying goodbye to our students. And actually the day after our Halloween party, we had a speech contest at our school (we've been helping 2 of our students prepare for it over the last 2 weeks), and one of our student's speeches was about how we and his homeroom teacher have influenced his life since he's been at To- O Gijuku, which only made us even sadder to leave. We know we need to make the most of our last 150 days with our students and are looking forward to it!