More Bunkasai Prep = Cookbook

So I swung past Takanan (my base school) - and by "swung by" I mean biked 45 minutes - to check up on the English Club and help out with our School Culture Festival prep. I was gone on Friday and with only three days left, I knew we'd have a lot of work to do.

When I got to school around 5:30pm, however, I was totally blown-away by everything the girls had accomplished in my absence. The seniors have done an amazing job with taking a leadership position and everyone is working together so well. I know I had a lot of fun with prom and the Native American exhibit the last two years, but considering the amount of actual language practice and how hard everyone is working right now... I honestly think this might be the best Culture Festival activity yet.

I will have pics of the final results of our project in a few days (after tomorrow, actually), but here are some sneak peaks at how things are going...

Here are the girls going over the photocopies for the cookbook. They updated and formatted the English versions of the recipes in the last few weeks (changing ingredients where we thought they needed to change) and THEN also translated it all into Japanese and added pictures.

Here are two of the 2nd years working on one of the posters - a world map explaining what countries and areas of the world the food we made comes from:
Working on large posters that show our recipes, pictures and ESS members' comments about the process and end-result of our cooking:
Cookbook waiting to be assembled...We took "purikura" (photo stickers) that week for the book and some ESS badges we'll wear at Bunkasai tomorrow. The girls blew up a few of them and printed them off.... check it out. Also not sure I should be teaching them so much keitai (cell phone and chat) slang vs. sticking to the basics of English. .. ha, gotta say I love the alphabet magnet creativity either way ;-)
Not from school... but thought I would include this one because it's kind of cute.  Lucky for me, my friend Ann was hosting taco night at her place (literally down the STREET from my school), so all I had to do was walk 10 minutes to veg out a bit, eat din and hang out with friends after ESS :) Great food and company!