School Festival

Last week was Tomioka School Festival, an event where all the classes in years four, five and six put on something special in their class. For example, this was the festival map:

There were ghost houses, game centres, pirate goings on, performances and things I only pretended to understand.

This is one of the game centres from a year five class.

The idea was you had to throw a large rolled up papier-mâché thing and hit a number to get points. The more pointsyou got, the better the origami something-or-other you could walk away with.

In another game centre there was a search in the load of shredded paper game. I wasn’t sure what we were searching for as I never found it.

Then the most innovative game I saw, was this.

You know those arcade games where you hit the heads of moles with a hammer when they briefly pop out of their holes. These kids had recreated this game with several kids sitting below a large cardboard enclosure with holes cut into the top. They stuck out different coloured papier-mâché things that you hit with a plastic hammer. The hammer was of the squeaky kind so that whenever you hit something it made a sound and allowed someone to could keep score. Here is a video of it.

There were two ghost houses, the first was Death Hand.

All the windows to the classroom had been blacked up to make it as dark and mysterious as possible. Queing up outside you had no idea what was within, which made some of the younger kids quite nervous. Inside there turned out to be a long corridor made from hanging material in which every now and then kids would randomly reach out and grab you, or spray water in your face.

The other haunted house was next-door and was far more sinister. In the queue outside was the following headless Barbie doll.

Sitting in a window too was this.

First years and second years kept running out of the classroom in sheer terror but for me the experience was less scary, both because of my age and my height. These things are designed for small people who don’t see the backstage crew standing over the hanging material walls with scary props to shove in your face. I think also, me being a teacher and all, they didn’t put on as scary a show as normal. For example, at the end of the corridor there was a kid sitting at a desk and I stood waiting for him to do something frightening. He didn’t, so I asked him, “Are you a scary person” and he just said, “yes.”

A year five class were running a Pirate room. On entering someone sat you down on a wheelie chair and pushed you around the room. The first game involved throwing cardboard crosses through a big cardboard skull. Then you had to use a torch to find as many Jack Sparrows as you could in the dark. Finally there was a tunnel thing to crawl through which was not designed for adults, I bruised my knee and broke my name badge trying to squeeze through it, it was unnervingly like being born. I got through though, and earned my folded paper bounty to put on my desk, or enjoy shredding.