Sports Day 2014...

Every year there is a sports day in all of the schools in Korea. Last year, our school was meant to have one, but the ferry disaster happened only a few week prior, so our sports day was cancelled. Many other schools did the same thing.

Instead, they scheduled a smaller one in the fall. This meant that this was the first time I got to witness the sports day festivities. Well most of them- apparently on a normal sports day, it is bigger and the 1st graders do a performance of some kind. Every teacher gets to help in some way and for this day I was on the official paper to be the photographer! I wanted to take pictures anyways! :)

To start the event off all of the students stand on the field and listen to the Principal, and Vice Principal give a speech. Next they perform group stretches that are put to music and a recorded voice saying "hai, hu, hou, ho" in a four count rhythm. All of the stretches are lead to that rhythm. It's actually quite entertaining the stretches that they do. One reminded me of reaching starts and then rowing to get to them.

Once they are all warmed up for the event....they sit down. This is because there are around 1000 students on the field so they have to take their turn with their grades. Each grade gets to do a sprint, and a game. The fastest and best runner or each class also compete in a relay race. The younger kids do what I would consider a 50 meter race, and the older grades do a 100 meter race.

As the student would cross the finish line, each student was given a stamp on their hand with the place that they finished in their heat. I didn't understand why they would do this, but I later heard that each different place would get different things as a reward. So first place would get 5 notebooks and second would get 3 and so on. This provided motivation for the kids.

Oh! - I was also given this nifty white gloves to make me look "official". All teachers got them... I was excited about them because I was looking for white gloves just like this for my Halloween costume! SCORE!

Here are some fun pictures from the day!

For the relay races the school was split into 2 teams, blue and white, so that the kids had someone to cheer for even if their grade wasn't racing! This helped them pay attention a little more and cheer other on.

Sports day lasted until about noon when they had the closing ceremony and were sent on their way. As you can see the weather was beautiful and amazing and it really was a great day. I'm glad I finally got to witness the legendary "Sports Day"!