 I liked making the video because I got to take pictures of everybody and sometimes I got to get out of class. The most enjoyable part was filming and photo-ing outside just to be out there and doing it, interviewing kids. In early December 2021, student members of the Arn Media Nights, an after-school club at Arn Elementary School, began actively filming video and taking photos to document a day in the life of an average American student. A few years ago, we started a cultural exchange with Kurihara Elementary School, which is a local Japanese school, and at that time we were able to visit their school and their students were able to come to ours. Due to COVID restrictions, last year we were not able to conduct the exchange. This year, a plan was created to exchange videos between the two schools. They captured students' morning routines at the school, along with scenes in the classroom, the cafeteria, and on the school bus. They even captured footage of what the restrooms in an American school look like in an effort to show every detail as part of a cultural exchange project with their friends at the Japanese Kurihara Elementary School. When I made the video, I was thinking I would do bathrooms and buses. The reason I did buses was because I go on the bus, so I know a little bit about it. And when we came out, I started taking pictures and videos of the buses. We went on to the bus and it was really fun. But for the bathrooms, it was different than the buses. When we were doing the bathrooms, we had to kind of coach down to get some of the good pictures and it was confusing of how to get the right pictures. We had to take lots of videos of classrooms and we got to take pictures of what all the classrooms look like or what all the critters look like for the entire classes and it was kind of fun. There was definitely a learning curve for our students because we just started the club in about November. And so this was our very first project, but we all just dove in and they did wonderfully. While the students at ARN were preparing their video, the students and one teacher at Kurihara were doing the same, capturing various scenes of daily life at a Japanese school. This included footage inside the classrooms, the latest things that were popular with students and even a special dance they performed at their annual sports festival. In early January of this year, school officials including ARN Principal Dr. Edwin Munoz and staff from the U.S. Army Garrison Japan Public Affairs Office visited Kurihara to give their video to the school and received from Kurihara the video the Japanese students had created. I kind of liked how they were trying really hard to speak English and I really liked how all the classrooms taught us how to play their classroom games. I kind of would like them to know how different or how similar the schools could be if you just compare them. It was really nice how they showed what their activities were and all their events, how they celebrated it. It makes me feel really good about being part of this and helping the Japanese kids learn what we do because maybe someday in the future if they know English and they want to go to schools in America then they can know sort of how we do things. This unique cultural exchange gave the students at both schools the opportunity to get an in-depth look at student life from a different perspective. The ARN Media Knights also got to learn more about the technical aspects of photography and videography in creating their video. I think that the students have definitely learned exactly what a day is like in the Japanese school which is very interesting to them because we're fortunate to be able to live here in this wonderful country of Japan. However, we don't always get to see the day-to-day activities that Japanese children and adults have so I think that's been a wonderful opportunity for them to see similarities and differences and just to be able to have that opportunity to share out about our world to them and we hope going forward once the COVID restrictions lift that we'll be able to continue this exchange in person and so then they can potentially even build friendships going forward. Reporting for U.S. Army Garrison Japan, this is Dustin Perry.