Japanese

In Japan, omusubi (onigiri) is a traditional handmade rice ball. In our traditional Japanese folktale, onigiri is often used and mentioned many times and it has been part of our life ever since. Omusubi Kororin is the tale of an honest old man whose rice ball rolls into a hole; a hole that leads to a village of kind field mice. The mice welcome the honest man and offer him a box of gold coins. Learning what happened, the old man's greedy neighbor heads to the hole and he attempts to steal a box by force, but the mice have their plan. 

Students learned this popular folktale for the first time and they learned some words such as Ojiisan, Obaasan, and Nezumi in the story this week. They filled out creatively those bubbles in the worksheet after watching "Omusubi Kororin". Considering they did not have much time to finish writing, always surprised me that some students do fantastic work in a very short time. 

They experienced making onigiri last semester and learned convenience stores even sell a variety of onigiri and Japanese buy and eat onigiri at any time of the meal. There are so many convenience stores that sell onigiri. Seven-Eleven in fact, sold more than 2.2 billion onigiri in 2019. I wanted to demonstrate to students how easy to make onigiri and there are so many varieties of topping you can add inside.  Healthy and delicious snack/meal. 

That is all from the Japanese class!

Have a lovely weekend everyone. 

またらいしゅう！"Mata raishuu" (See you next week)

Bawden Sensei

kbawden@sjyarrajunction.catholic.edu.au