Welcome to a New Year of Japanese - The Year of the Dragon!

This term in Japanese we have been focusing on building new routines in the classroom to get us into the Japanese learning zone. We are discussing what it means to be good linguists, as we challenge ourselves to have a go without being afraid of making mistakes – because mistakes help us learn!

The Foundation students have started the year off with enthusiasm as they’ve been singing and dancing their way through Japanese. The songs have helped them practice some important words for beginning and ending the lesson - konnichiwa (hello!) and sayonara (goodbye!). They’ve been perfecting their bowing too, which is an important part of greetings and farewells in Japanese culture. 

Foundation have done a great job at developing their listening skills as they learn to respond to classroom instructions in Japanese such as “stand up”, “sit down”, and “quiet please”. Their activities have had them moving their bodies while building language about their bodies too. Take a look at their skills as they clap their hands and stretch up high! 

The 1/2 students have been enjoying one of the perks of Japanese culture – taking off your shoes when you’re indoors! They’ve been careful to place them in beautifully neat lines, and have been responding to the instructions to take their shoes on and off given in Japanese only – what superstars!

Each 1/2 class has already built a solid routine to start the lesson, involving lots of speaking and listening in Japanese. They begin by greeting the teacher – sensei konnichiwa – accompanied by a polite bow of course, before freeing their feet to the instruction of kutsu o nuide kudasai (please take off your shoes). During the roll, everyone takes turns to answer o genki des ka? (how are you), and let the teacher know how they’re feeling – all in Japanese! Then it’s off to their tables to work on their writing skills in hiragana, starting with their names. Their writing is looking amazing already and the students have been talking about how proud they are of their efforts. Keep up the great work 1/2!

The senior end of the school has also done a fabulous job of establishing the opening and closing routine for each lesson. In the style of classrooms in Japan, each week in 3/4 and 5/6 we have a student taking on the role of class leader. It is their responsibility to give instructions to the rest of the class to greet/farewell the teacher and begin/end the lesson. All their instructions and responses are given in Japanese and it’s been excellent to see how many students have already volunteered for the role in every class. 

Armed with their hiragana charts and an insanely catchy song, the Year 3-6s have been exploring the sounds of the Japanese language and the first of the three writing systems in Japan, hiragana. They have experimented with writing their own names and deciphering the names of their classmates. Moving forward in listening practise, they will be challenging themselves to write vocabulary words as they hear them. Our senior students will need to use these growing skills as they draft their self-introduction letters to be sent over to students in Japan. I’m excited to see what they create!