For the last week of our program, we started with making sleeping bags. We showed our students a real sleeping bag and a teacher demonstrated how we sleep in one. They laughed a lot, pointed, and said, “A caterpillar!!!”
Then they all made their own sleeping bag. We put them in the gym and looked at the night sky (a planetarium). They poked holes in paper and made their own ‘constellations’. Some of the boys made a ‘train constellation’ or constellations of letters or hiragana.
When we put a flashlight behind their paper constellations to project them onto the ceiling, they said “Wow!” The elder students were so excited to see them while the young students just quietly looked up at the ‘stars’.
Another camping activity we did was to make a ‘kimodaneshi’ area and we listened to Japanese ghost stories.
