UN Day at IST

October 24, 2012-

Today is UN Day at IST!  Apparently, the United Nations (UN) was founded on October 24, 1945 so today we're celebrating its birthday!  Kind of makes sense considering this IS an INTERNATIONAL school with people from All Over The World.  The students were asked to come dressed up in either their home-land or some other country costumes/traditional dress. Well….what is the national dress/costume for the USA???????  

I think we'll do jeans and DIY USA flag t-shirts.  :-) Jeans and t-shirts are pretty close to our national costume, right?????

Mark and I painted some white t-shirts to represent the US flag.  I painted and botched the first one so Mark, who is – thankfully- more careful than me, painted the t-shirts.  Thanks, Mark!!!!!

Here's my botched t-shirt in progress. (I used too much water and the paint bled heavily under the masking tape.) I call it an impressionistic US flag shirt. But you get the idea, right?

About an hour before school started the girls raced over to Holly's house (Holly is a fellow Wisconsite) to have their hair done.  

Didn't Holly do a FANTABULOUS job????

Ava has two pony tails and red, white and blue paint in her hair.

Annika has a neat braid (with red, white and blue) and a pony-tail.

A tiny bit better view of the neat paint/braid/pony-tail that Holly created in Annika's hair.

UN Day parade:

Proudly sporting our country's colors!!!! RED, WHITE and BLUE!!!!!

All the classes did a short parade around the parking lot in front of the primary school building (on the school grounds).

Debbie dressed up in this beautiful South African shirt. Debbie, does this costume have a name???

The fourth grade class…you can see Marko also has a shirt similar to his mom's.

After the some-what noisy parade we all settled into the Han building theater for the UN Day Concert.  Due to it being a school-wide event AND because the next-door Japanese school students were invited to the event- well, we parents were stuck at the VERY BACK of the theater.  I mean- the.very.back.  Hence, the lousy following photos!  

First the Japanese students opened the concert with an amazing Japanese drums piece (can't remember what the drums are called.  I'll try to convert a video so you can see it for yourself.)  The whole theater was thundering with the sound of those drums!!!!

The IST primary Choir performed two South African songs.  Nice surprise for Debbie!!!  Annika is in this choir:

I know, I know. How can you even tell where Annika is??? She's in the back row sort of in the middle.

Several other groups performed as well.  The Indian moms did something called The Stick Dance (did I get that right?), the Americans did a sign language performance (shame on us- we didn't participate in this as I felt that we had too many things on our plate as it is), some students did a karate demonstration and then came the IST Teacher's Band:

These guys really know how to rock!!!!

The concert was tons of fun- even though it did have a huge overly environmental overtone to it.  (you're preaching to the wrong audience!)

I didn't understand everything that happened the rest of the day….all the parents were asked to bring two dishes for a lunch (I brought pumpkin pies).  All I understood was that it was supposed to feed 700 + people….but I wasn't sure whom they were feeding and who was running the lunch.  It was all rather confusing.  In the end, I learned that the food was for the students, teachers/staff and (I guess?) parents.  I didn't eat lunch here as I didn't know about it.  Maybe next year I'll know a little bit more.  Well, confusing or not I think the kids, at least, had a good time. 😉

Thanks to Holly for helping do up the girls' hair!!!!!