Cleaning Time

Every day after lunch, the Shirogane Primary School students have to clean their school. Each class is responsible for their own room, as well as various other parts of the school, including the bathrooms and the school grounds. For example, the Year 5 class must clean their own classroom, the spare classroom next door, the school gym, and the corridors outside the gym. They break up into teams, and the teams rotate through the jobs each week.

Our students joined in with gusto - perhaps because it is such a novelty for them? Tate-sensei suggested that maybe we should adopt school cleaning by the students at All Saints', but they didn't seem too keen on that idea! Japanese teachers believe that cleaning their own school helps the students to care for and appreciate what they have. It also encourages them to be very clean and pick up after themselves, because there is no-one else who is going to clean-up after them!