Melville Intermediate - Saitama City Cultural Exchange

The students from Melville Intermediate School are very lucky at present to have a group of student visitors from Saitama City in Japan.  The students and the students of Melville Intermediate have been involved in a variety of learning activities.  On Monday afternoon the students engaged in a cultural exchange.  Melville Intermediate taught the students from Saitama City several action songs.  This video is of the lesson.  Filmed by Jamie and Wattana from Room Five.
SaitamaCulturalR2Exchange2013 from myles webb on Vimeo.

 On the 8^th August 2013, some of the Melville Intermediate students were standing in the middle of the tech courts waving and saying Hello the all the Japanese students who had come all the way from Saitama (Hamilton’s sister city). Everyone was excited to see them and we couldn’t wait to do really fun activities with them. Yesterday we did an exhilarating fitness rotation with them. Everyone enjoyed it and some of us learned that the Japanese are really good at dancing and Double Dutch. Also The Saitama students have been going on trips around Hamilton and they were very lucky to meet the Mayor of Hamilton. They have been in the classrooms a few times and when they have, they have been paired up with some buddies and done activities with us about Japan. They are leaving tomorrow and we will be very sad to see them go since we have so much fun with them. By Elizabeth

Melville Intermediate - Saitama Buddy Recout

Each year at Melville Intermediate School we are lucky to have regular visitors from different countries who come to our school.  One of the groups are students from Saitama City in Japan.  Room Five students hosted several of these this year and Jamie wrote about her buddy experience in this recount of 2012.

The Saitama Buddies

We walked into the hall in our class lines and sat down quietly. We were getting ready for the Saitama students from Japan to come into our hall for the welcoming. We practiced a couple of songs then the welcoming began.

The Saitama buddies walked into the hall and sat down quietly. We sang songs and Mr Cooke welcomed them to Melville Intermediate. The welcoming started at 1:30 and finished at 3:00. We had a great time meeting them. The next day we came to school and when 9:00 hit the clock we were off to the design room to meet our buddies. When I was at the front of the line I knew which one was for me she was pretty, looked like she had some awesome hobbies and guess what….. She was my buddy. In my head I was just like YES. She was perfect. I showed her around the school and she told me her name was Momoko. Then I told her that it was such a beautiful name. We talked about our hobbies and favourite things. Once I had showed her around our school I took her back to my class. We rearranged the desks so everyone could sit down. Then we started to talk about Japan and what things represent their country like the Kiwi represents our country. The bell rung so we could eat. After interval they had to go back to the design room. The next day they didn’t come to class so we just had a normal day, and on Monday Momoko was in the hospital and had a bad fever. But we still had a great time together.

I will never forget Momoko. She was such a lovely person.

By Jamie