Easter: Egg contest

Having prepared 52 eggshells, unblemished apart from two innocuous pinholes, I brought in markers and crayons for the class. Iwase-sensei and I announced the contest, complete with a cute poster Iwase prepared, and cut them loose. They had one full class period to work, and then were allowed to take them home and finish.

Most of the students began with crayons, but soon abandoned them for markers. Since they weren't using dye this time, there was no need to be afraid of the marker bleeding. Several students started sticking things onto the egg: stickers, ribbons, hairpins, plastic beads, etc. One of the twins actually painted a map of Japan on his. Yuka covered hers in hot pink marker, then in black marker drew designs, butterflies, and "Rebirth" in English. Yuki decorated hers with a smiling mouth and a single, cute eye, making an adorable cyclops egg. Taishi used crayons and colored pencils to turn his egg into a globe.

Ryousuke started by coating his egg in glue. He then went to the chalkboard, took a pieced of red chalk, and began drawing the same line over and over again. It took me a minute, but I figured it out--he wanted to collect the chalkdust and sprinkle it on his glue-covered egg. After getting halfway done, he decided against it and spent the rest of class washing it off. Seika turned hers into Doraemon, complete with a ball of paper colored red and glued on for a tail. Yumeka went all-out with stickers and beads, decorating hers with manga or anime characters neither Iwase nor I could identify. Yukari drew a baby Mickey Mouse on hers.

Shunsuke turned his into a hatching dinosaur. He took bits of newspaper, shaped them into four limbs and a tail, and painted them green. He then glued them on the egg, while decorating it such that the legs were sticking out of holes, and two yellow eyes were peeking from the same hole as the two forelimbs.

The first group made it through class without dropping theirs. The second group wasn't so lucky. Iwase and I had been afraid of this, and had prepared a couple of extras just in case. Wakana was standing at the front of class with a few other girls, trying to decide how to decorate hers, when it just slipped and fell. It didn't shatter--all there was to show for it was a visible dent--but she didn't know what to do. Wakana transferred to Toyotama this past year, and consequently she's more outgoing and talkative with everyone (including me), so she asked me what she should do. I suggested using that as part of the design--a cracked egg. She put a Cinderella band-aid over the dent, and decorated it as Anpanman with an "ouch" face.

Students were to turn them in to me as they finished, and fill out an entry form. Each egg would be identified by a number, and put on display for voting during lunch one day. The numbers helped keep the artists unknown. I wasn't around for the day of actual voting, but I learned that Shunsuke's dinosaur won, Seika's Doraemon came in second, and Kozue's egg came in third.