When did Halloween in Japan start? Milky Way students found out that Halloween in Japan started 24 years ago when Tokyo Disneyland made its first Halloween event in order to attract more visitors during the autumn. Since then, Japanese began to wear costumes and throw Halloween parties to have fun. But other traditions, like trick-or-treating did not catch on as it is considered impolite to knock on strangers’ doors. They also discovered that the Celts who lived in Ireland, United Kingdom, and France are the ones who started Halloween and they called it harvest festival in the beginning which eventually changed to Halloween.

This week, the students who brought a trip souvenir from their homes finished presenting it to their friends through Show and Tell. They learned about new countries from their friends’ stories and were amazed by the various souvenirs they saw. Thank you so much, Milky Way parents, for being involved in our UOI. We enjoyed hearing their stories behind their souvenirs. 

In our reading lesson, we read the RAZ book “Halloween Costumes” which is just in time for our school event which is the Halloween party. Everybody shared what costumes they were going to wear in the party and felt more excited to attend the party.

On Friday, we held our Halloween party. Everybody had so much fun playing various games in the party, proudly presented themselves with their wonderful and scary costumes, and were very happy to receive their treat bags!

Since we are learning about the countries around the world, we thought it would be nice for the students to also learn other languages. In addition to Japanese and English languages, now Milky Way students are learning how to count 1-10 and days of the week in Spanish. And they are very interested in learning about this language. There were also a few students who knew how to sing the Happy Birthday song in Korean, so we asked them to sing it to their friend who celebrated her birthday and everybody in the class started singing it together. We also listened to happy birthday songs in different languages. While they were listening to the song, they were trying to understand the lyrics and guess what language they were.

That’s all for this week! Thank you for coming to our Halloween party and for your continued support! Have a fantastic weekend and Happy Halloween!