Chusok Party

So as everybody who reads this blog knows (or lives in Korea), this weekend was Chusok, one of the biggest holidays of the year in Korea. Since it fell on Saturday, my school took Friday off and Thursday was mostly Chusok activities. I made the decision to stay out until about 4:00 Wednesday night since I didn't have to teach in the morning. Let's just say I wasn't looking or feeling my best, so I was fortunate that all I had to do was take pictures, and didn't have any pictures taken of me.

Speaking of pictures, I'm going to tell the story of our Chusok festivities with the Kindergardeners through some photos.

So every one of the children dressed up in some fancy traditional Korean outfits. All of them were just ridiculously bright colors. The girls wore little dresses and the boys wore outfits that looked like what Aladdin wears.

7 year olds David, Chris, Alyssa, Brian, and Jenny

More 7 year olds Michael, Catherine, Barbie, Euris, Dorothy, and Monica

One of the activities was to put down two floor mats and have the kids sit back to back with legs out. They then tried to push with their feet and hands to send the other kid forward off of the mat. It's like backwards sumo wresting in a way.

7 year olds David and Ryan

Cindy vs. Isabel

Another activity was to have the kids arm wrestle. I'm not really sure if this is actually a Korean tradition. I always associate arm wresting with fat, sweaty middle-aged truckers with thick forearms.

I don't really know these two kids because I don't teach them

The kids then played a game where they had to throw these darts into a box. The darts were made of two chopsticks taped together and then a felt cone on one end and a traditional looking tail made out of felt. This game was fun to watch because some of the kids are so uncoordinated.

Gloria lining up her shot

I'm not sure of this girl's name because I don't teach her

The next thing they did was took these things that looked like bicycle streams with a weight attached to them and threw them up in the air and kicked them. Non of the pictures of this turned out because they were moving so much. It was cute when they just put them on their heads.

Euris with a nice mop top

The next thing that happened was the two female teachers in the room sat down on chairs and let the kids throw the toys into their dresses.

Semi teacher and Kelly teacher

With one of the groups Kelly teacher sat all of the kids down and told them a story for about twenty minutes or so. She is an excellent story teller, and held the kids attention for the entire time. I couldn't understand a single word she said.

One of the final activities was to teach the children how to bow, so here is Joo. Joo is Kelly teacher's daughter.

Next was a game where all of the girls sat down next to each other, like below, and then they have to close their eyes and the boys come and sit down behind them and I'm not even really sure what happens after that or why any of it happens. None of these events were really explained to me. Oops.

Daisy, Lyn, Isabel, and Joo, some sassy little girls