Ms Sands, can we have a goat?

Year 6 students have so many terrific opportunities - but the most amazing of the lot is the chance to travel to Tokyo in October and stay with a Japanese family and attend school there for a week. It is the excursion to end all excursions - and I love it.

For four years I've accompanied a group of bright eyed and bushytailed youngsters, many on their first international travel experience. And this year's group of seven boys and girls were no exception.

We had a fabulous week of fun and learning and making new friends. The trip included visits to Seioji Temple, Asakusa, Meiji Shrine, Harajuku Street, Mirikan, and the Monster Cafe. School days consisted of Lego Mindstorms, Music, English lessons, technology, art and science as well as calligraphy classes and tea ceremony.

All children formed strong bonds with their homestay families and embarked on a few excursions of their own - DisneyLand, Tokyo Sky Tree, Tokyo Tower, and just playing with Japanese kids in the streets.

I love listening to the children during the week as they reflect on their experience and recount funny and unusual stories - some want to go back to live, some are hooked on seeing the rest of the world, some have made friends for life, some have fallen in love with the food, some love the shopping, all are bug eyed at the culture and the friendliness of the people.

But the star of the show is really Vanilla, Sagami Women's University Elementary School's pet goat. She sat out on the oval during the day getting patted and munching on Autumn leave and the kids were besotted with her.

Every year there's someone who says 'Ms Sands, can we get a goat?'

'OMG - she said NAKED!'

What is it about certain words and their ability to create paroxysms of laughter in kids?  The usual sections of our vocabulary that achieve this are to do with certain body parts and most often to do with bodily functions. But a few weeks ago just before our Preps started their swimming lessons, classes were reduced to chaos because the teacher said, God forbid, 'UNDIES!'

Not just as baldly as that, of course, - it was in the context of naming all their clothes before Friday but the very word 'undies' and the fact the teacher was saying it was enough to produce screams of laughter from some and shocked hands-over-mouth actions from others. One Prep teacher told me several members of her class kept looking at the classroom door as if the language police were about the descend and haul the teacher away to be reprimanded!

And then, of course, last week we had Nude Food Day.  When one of our Student Leaders did a skit on stage at Assembly a few weeks ago to promote the event, he said the word 'nude' about six times. 730 kids were either aghast, collapsing with laughter or looking like they couldn't believe their ears! (Actually, that's an exaggeration - there weren't 730 - one class was at art and a couple at swimming lessons.)

Nude Food Day was a hit - nearly every child got into the swing of bringing a rubbish free lunch box to school. But despite the tag name for this new movement in our community being well known and documented, and a commonplace practice in some other schools that our children have come from, some kids could not get past that you could say 'nude' at school, and what's more, the teachers, upright citizens in our community, kept saying it!

Image courtesy of http://www.nudefoodday.com.au/gallery.php

After morning tea, I went around to most classes to see how rubbish free lunch boxes had been. The kids were excited that there had been no rubbish in the playground (actually the teachers were more excited about this, and our cleaners more excited again!) and they all told me that they thought we should do it every day (especially as most of them were sporting big stickers for their efforts!)

I stuck my head in the window of one classroom and said 'So, how naked were your lunches today?' You should have seen their faces - 'Oh my God, she said NAKED!' And they were off again. (The class teacher wanted to kill me!)

You have to love our kids. In other schools it takes really socially inappropriate language and references to raise such mirth. But not ours - you only have to mention undies and suggest rubbish free lunches to pull off a laugh that would be coveted by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

The power of language

The other night a parent of our school and I were having an email conversation about a fund raising event. She sent me a proof of the advertisement announcing proudly 'I'm wasted, you know.' Well, I got it - really, I did. I understood she meant that on a Wednesday night surely she had better things to do and that really she should be employed by someone to be this creative (and she should - she's very clever!) Anyway after about 10 minutes I received another email frantically informing me that she wasn't drunk - she didn't mean 'that wasted'. I couldn't stop laughing for 10 minutes.

Then, this morning Mark (our Schools Officer) requests an urgent meeting and informs me that a cleaner had fallen off the top of a fridge and caused some damage. He then started whizzing through photos of other workplace health and safety concerns he had taken while I'm trying to envision Robyn, Marylin, Craig or Allan falling off the fridge. I asked 'what was a cleaner doing on the fridge?' He replied 'well, that's a good question!' I was actually aghast. We were then interrupted by the school photographs and I had to run off to the oval. (Mornings are completely silly in our school!)

After the photo I told everyone that we had an injured cleaner and everyone needed to clean up their kitchens and comms rooms to ensure we wouldn't have any more incidents. Out of the corner of my eye I could see all our cleaners standing there - none with any injuries! And then it dawned on me! Mark meant that a vacuum cleaner which had been put on top of the fridge had fallen off.

The power of language, and how we can be so easily misunderstood. The lesson is you just have to ask more questions - otherwise you'll be wasted after falling off the top of a fridge!

Have a great weekend, everyone!