media-9

[7:38]Let me tell you a little bit about the classroom, when we started with the entire class, I showed the children how to bind the book by hand, my friend said that was Japanese binding so the way that the book opens from left to right, we took a travel, we took our trip to Japan, and show the children how to fill out passport information, because that's a skill that they need to do when they are older, filling out forms, and what did one actually looks like to get a passport in the United States, and of course there is a picture, but I used my passport for something else, I used it so they could record all of the books they read about Japanese culture, could be a folk tale, it could be a history book, it could be a biography, any type of book that was connected to Japan, and as you can see, the children were really encouraged to, and they were also enthusiastic to read all of these books. This child read lots. I use the star because it was collected as StarFestival, just a little incentive, [9:11]and we did a lot of writing, usually we write in journals but I allowed them to do this, do their writing in this book, and I begin with their ideas ofJ apan, and what did they know, because I knew that they knew very little, and as we reflected each time, we learned about living in an island because Japan is made up by many many islands, so they brought up a discussion about what kind of animals, what kind of foods, and that led us into doing a little bit of research, about animals, sea animals, so the children did some illustrations as well and some of them even wrote some poetries about the animal themselves, some really nice nice work developed from it, and it was nice because it wasn’t just, okay let’s write a story or let’s do a research about animal, let’s do a poem about fish, they really had an interest now. Because of the couple of sites where they visit the market where they had the auction. And what interested them was they spoke to a fisherman, but it wasn’t a fisherman, it was a woman. So they were quit amused that it was a woman that was speaking to them and telling them how hard life was doing that kind of work.

[11:11]We also had, let me just show you a little bit more, the professor came to visit us, so they recorded their reflections on that day, and as they learned, they wrote a little bit about what the impression were at the time. Here you see the study of the family tree which you saw the family timeline before, and then we learned map skills, a little bit about celebration, they didn’t know any thing about Tanabata, I didn’t know anything about Tanabata either, but now I think I know enough to amuse them, and entertain them, we were able to compare the weather of Tokyo, and some of the other cities, at the time they were getting ready for the Olympics in Nagano, so we were able to also tie in some information about the Olympics as well, and basically other interesting activities, we did weather studies, time zone studies, which is part of the geography that we have to do, and lots and lots of information, interesting is the letter writing. That they had to do, we deliver a bit of connection between America and Japan, and the picture birds, and a little bit about Hiroshima, and each one of the boys was one of the gentlemen who live in Hawaii at the time. He was looking for bride and wrote a letter, to a Japanese woman, and the results were really really good, so these are just a few things that we’ve accomplished, but there’re lots and lots of ideas and lots of branching out that any teacher could do, and you’ll have fun doing it.