Undokai

Well the combination of trauma and extreme cuteness kept me silent on this one for one week but here goes.

From primary schools on up schools in Japan almost universally have an undokai - I'll translate that loosely as a fitness extravaganza in the fall. This is where you have your three-legged races and so on, but this is so much more ambitious. Yochien undokai are pretty amazing. These teachers somehow manage to teach groups of 15-20 3-6 year olds to perform dances, make pyramids, race, walk on stilts, and stay with their group for about six hours! For the 3-4 year olds it is less ambitious, but at Sam's school they did a dance, running down the field, a simple obstacle course (go under a tarp, ride a ride on toy, put on a swimming donut, and run to the teacher), parent-child relay, throwing some balls, and then all the various lining up and sitting with their class all day. All the kids attempted all of this and were generally good sports on an 80 degree day.

Well, except Sam. He spent most of the day running off on his own or throwing a tantrum while people attempted to get him involved. He had been quite enjoying the practice leading up to this and showed us various gymnastic moves he was learning - pretty impressive. But some combination of the bright sun (it was unusually hot for October), mobs of people, and just plain stubbornness kept him from enjoying it much that day. I was impressed with how patient the teachers were. I was thinking he was pretty much a lost cause for the day, but a teacher's assistant who has been working with him a lot and his regular teacher when she could get a moment free just kept working to involve him and get him interested. This worked enough to get him into the obstacle course which he had enjoyed in rehearsal.



And he was willing to do the parent child relay with me. We had fun with that.



Daddy was roped into tug-of-war. They seemed to think they would win by having the tall foreigner. But one of the other team seemed to have the really young fathers (in red) who were pretty daunting and did in all the 30+ fathers on the other team.




Anyway, we felt really bad for the teachers who did everything they could to get him to enjoy the experience. Most of the kids really do seem to be having a great time doing all this stuff, and I expect if we were here a year from now he'd be joining in full steam ahead. While we were a bit upset by Sam being so difficult, all the other parents and teachers were very encouraging and supportive of him. The management of these group activities always seems to have built in a strong kids will be kids attitude - kids will do their own thing but they also really like structure and to show off sometimes. I thought the undokai gave most of the kids a chance to learn something new through the complex but coherent dances and tasks in a supportive environment and show it off to themselves and parents.