[7th Meeting]　Rehearsing for the City Proposal and a Fun Christmas Party!

Professor Mitsu's Greeting

In Japanese tradition, today (Dec. 13th) is the day we start getting ready for new year. For us, it is also the day we rehearse our proposal for the city in January. So today, let’s get ready really well for the big day. When we make our proposal, we should include:

• Things that many people are having trouble with 
• What we learned by trying things 
• The solutions we thought of 
• What we want to ask the city

If we add fun ideas that make the Mayor think “That sounds fun” or “I want to try it,” our presentation will be even better. In past proposals, kids gave presents or let the Mayor try games they made. 

On the day of the presentation, let’s look at the Mayor and the city council members and speak loudly and cheerfully. 

Let’s practice a lot so we can do our best!

Elementary Team A: Our Big Challenge to Tell the Mayor Our Ideas in Our Own Words

To get ready for our proposal, we made our PowerPoint slides and wrote what we want to say. Because we are the ones presenting, we tried to use easy words that we can say smoothly. When we practiced, we tried to speak clearly and loudly. We didn’t just read the script. We tried to explain it in our own words. That made us feel even more excited for the day of our presentation. Next time is finally the big day. We want to use everything we worked on all year and do our best until the end, so we can share our ideas with the Mayor.

Elementary Team B: We Want to Make a Presentation the Council Members Will Remember

This time was our last Children’s Conference meeting before the proposal day, so we had a lot to finish. It felt really busy, but also exciting. We colored our poster and thought of a strong one line message that people will remember. Even though we didn’t have much time, we focused more than ever and worked super hard. We finished the poster quickly, and we even had a little extra time left. So before the rehearsal, we could read through the script together and practice. In the rehearsal, we still looked at the script a lot while presenting, but we want to practice more and do an awesome presentation on the real day.

Elementary Team C: Practicing More and More to Make Our Proposal Presentation Better

We worked on three big things today. First, we made slides for our presentation. Second, we made a strawberry milk recipe. Third, we did a practice rehearsal for our proposal to the Mayor. When we made the slides, we asked everyone for ideas and made them together. For the strawberry milk recipe, we kids did it all by ourselves. We looked up cute drawings, balanced the pictures and words, added colors, and made a recipe that is really easy to read. During the rehearsal, it was still hard to look up because we kept looking at our script. That’s something we want to improve before the real day. But we could speak smoothly without messing up our words, so we felt proud of that.

Junior High Team D: Seeing How Much We’ve Grown and Looking Forward to the Mayor Proposal

We only have one meeting left before the day we share our proposal with the Mayor, so we worked hard on our slides and our speech. At first, the university students were going to make most of it because the topic is kind of difficult. But then we junior high students started making the materials by ourselves. So the university students said, “Okay, let’s trust you,” and let us take the lead. The university students helped us with how to say things and how to organize our ideas, but we wrote almost everything in our own words. We could really feel how much we have grown. Next time is finally the big day. We are excited, but also nervous. This kind of chance doesn’t happen very often for junior high students, so most of all, we want to enjoy it and do our best.

High School Team E: Community × Connecting People × Disaster Prevention

We talked about what makes Yahata City special. Then we thought about how we can help the city by thinking about disaster prevention. After our discussion, we decided to make an original disaster prevention KARUTA game (Japanese traditional cards game) just for Yahata City. We high school students had a lot of fun sharing ideas and talking together. We worked hard while thinking carefully about the words and pictures. From now on, we want to use this KARUTA as an example and help more schools and kindergartens make their own disaster prevention KARUTA. By playing KARUTA, we hope people can learn more about disaster prevention and also connect with people of different ages.

Santa Came to the Children’s Conference!

At this Children’s Conference, we had a super fun Christmas party. Everyone wore Santa hats or reindeer headbands, and the room felt full of Christmas cheer. During lunch break, fourth year university students, Inaba seminar graduates, and graduate students prepared an exciting lottery and yummy "octopus" cracker for us. People who won first, second, or third prize got nice Christmas sweets. Then a third year university student showed up dressed as Santa Claus, and we all enjoyed an early Christmas together. After the fun party gave us lots of energy, we practiced hard again for the afternoon rehearsal.