Cultural Week

One Monday morning, I walked to Ms. Corin's class and found the door locked. Upon inquiring at the office, I found that the school had begun their annual Cultural Week. For a whole week, regular classes were canceled and students participated in various cultural activities taught by parent volunteers and the Manamko. The fifth graders spent their mornings with Mrs. Sablan making bead necklaces and folding origami. In the afternoons, they were treated to dancing and singing lessons with some manamko as well as story telling. There was also mwar and lei making which we didn't get to try. Oh, well, maybe next time. ;D
One afternoon, we learned how to weave coconut leaves into baskets and hats. It was during this time that Ms. Corin left me to supervise the class while she went on an errand. Two fifth grade classes were combined to do the weaving and the other teacher was there too. Two manamko women were assigned to teach a group of 40 fifth graders how to weave. It was chaos. A group of students would gather around the women and watch them weave for exactly 3 minutes, then they would scatter and another group would surround the women. Those students not watching the manamko were doing all sorts of crazy things with their coconut fronds.
I really felt bad for the manamko women who were really trying their best to show the students how to weave. However, the setup was just terrible. The kids were all over the place and the manamko could only help one student at a time with their weaving. I tried my best to learn the weaving and keep my eye on the other students at the same time so I could at least try to help the other students. I believe weaving is a very important cultural skill for our students to learn. I myself would have loved to learn from the manamko women. Looking back, I think the weaving session should have been structured better. There should have been more manamko as well as some younger people to teach the weaving. The manamko got tired easily. I believe if the students could get proper instruction, they would all just sit down and get busy because weaving is really a fun activity. But it was still an interesting experience.
On Thursday, students from Seisa Gakuen, a highschool in Japan, came to visit San Antonio Elementary School. Seisa Gakuen is a sister school of Marianas High School. What's really interesting is that the students that came to SAES are the special needs students of Seisa Gakuen. Honestly, I didn't even notice any disabilities in the students unless I was looking very carefuly. All of them were very friendly and energetic and the San Antonio students just took to them. The Seisa Gakuen students performed a dance number for us and then had some students join them. The rest of the day, the sixth graders hosted the Japanese students.
On Friday, the manamko performed several dance numbers for assembly. The old folks looked so cute dancing in their various costumes. It was very nice of them to come out to San Antonio for the students.
I really enjoyed myself during Cultural Week. I have to admit that it was a nice break from having to plan lessons. :D Enjoy my slideshow of Cultural Week!