Children's Day

On May 5th, they celebrated Children's Day in Korea (although it generally feels like every day could be given that title). At our kindergarten, there were two days worth of celebrations!

First, on Thursday the children's mothers brought all sorts of good food to the school for a special buffet lunch. In their Korean classrooms, the children had quite the feast. The English teachers also benefited from this as there was more than enough food to feed a school twice their size. So lunch on Thursday was quite a treat. I filled up on pizza, fried chicken and a lot of fruit (I especially enjoyed the watermelon, as we have not bought it here yet, we still find ourselves unable to give in and pay $16 for a watermelon; $16 is the in season price, it was closer to $30 dollars out of season).

Then on Friday we had a marathon day for the kids. The four year old kids ran 500m, the five year old kids ran 1000m and the six year old kids ran 1500m. Our job was to encourage the kids to not give up and to make it to the finish line (and of course to appear in class photos with the kids). It was fun cheering the kids on. We only had to help a couple of crying kids, who had stop running or had sat down on the path and given up altogether. It was also a nice change of pace for a couple days. It is fun bonding with and seeing the kids in an environment other than the formal classroom.