School Days

Today was the Welcoming Ceremony at Ethan's school for all the new students. Me and my American brain were thinking "open house at the beginning of the year", casual, visit Ethan's class, meet his teacher, etc, etc. Remind me to stop using my American brain for anything Japanese! It was a huge, formal ceremony! All the moms and girls were in dresses, the dads and boys in suits, it was a very long, drawn out affair. Very typical Japanese style, I've heard graduations are a hundred times worse. Of course Ethan and I showed up in jeans and Ethan had spilled chocolate milk all down the front of his shirt! I was mortified! But again, in typical Japanese style, everyone was extremely polite and friendly and made us feel very welcome. Ethan is in the Himawari (sunflower) class, his teacher is Nyuuda Sensei. He spent about an hour with his classmates and teacher and seemed to be enjoying himself.

This is Ethan's winter uniform, it's just a smock. But it has the cutest matching hat and all the kids wear matching backpacks. Don't worry, you know I'll be taking tons of pictures of him on Monday! In May they'll switch to a lighter weight smock. The little duck pin on the left says "Welcome to school"! (in Japanese).

This is Ethan's name badge, he'll wear it everyday for the first month or so, it actually says Ethan Baker (Gabi read it for us!!); there's also a little tag w/ his bus number on it.

These are the school supplies, every child has to have exactly the same supplies, so the school puts together these "craft boxes" and you just buy them from the office. In the box (clockwise from upper left): box for clay, scissors, paste, castanets (weird), crayons, clay, clay molding sticks. To the right of the box are his gym/outdoor hat, drawing pad and 3 different books for communicating different things b/w home and school. Each class is color coded, the Himawari class is orange. Next year he'll be either pink (Otis is very nervous about Ethan getting a pink hat) or yellow.

Ethan in his gym uniform.