Japanese Day

Our very first Japanese Day has been fantastic! The kids have really enjoyed spending a day learning about different aspects of Japan. 
The children were split into three groups and worked through the following activities throughout the day:

- Japanese Cooking with Mrs Hancock where they were busy making okonomiyaki which is a savoury pancake is made up of flour, dashi, cabbage, water and bacon. 

- Japanese art with Miss Jury where we have been busy creating Sakura Lanterns to celebrate the Hanami Festival (ask your children to explain).

- And we have been so fortunate to have Saho take our third group and learn origami, Japanese games and how to write their name in kanji. Saho is visiting from Japan so we are so lucky to have to skills and knowledge here helping us out. 

Its been a brilliant day where the children have worked hard to use their new language skills and learn a bit more about the Japanese culture. 

Painting our Sakura Lanterns. 

Our beautiful Sakura Lanterns.

Some of the kids with their names written in kanji.

Whipping up okonomiyaki  with Mrs Hancock.

Japanese with Mrs Karasawa and Saaho

Not only were we lucky enough to have Mrs Karasawa come and take another Japanese lesson but we also got to meet Saaho - a Japanese exchange student.

Mrs Karasawa and Saaho

Mrs Karasawa and Saaho taught us how to say our age correctly and the vocabulary that goes with this.  One of the ways they helped us learn this was through Speed Dating! Well not really, but it was like speed dating. We lined up in two lines. One line asked the question '"How old are you?" and the other line answered, then the line moved on. Watch this video to see how it went. 

After that we went outside and had a game of Chinese Whispers - well in this case it was actually Japanese Whispers! Teams had to come to Mrs Karasawa and listen to a sentence. Then they had to take it to their team and whisper it to the next person in the line. When the last person had the whisper they ran to Saaho and repeated it to her. It was interesting to note how often we got the whispers wrong!

All lined up in teams.

Checking with Saaho.

Passing that whisper along.

It was a really fun lesson. Now we are looking forward to next week and seeing what cool things Mrs Karasawa and Saaho will come up with. 

Japanese

Monday saw us take part in our first Japanese language session. Luckily for me (as my Japanese is as limited as the kids) we had Fleur from St Mary's school come and lead the lesson.  It was a really fun lesson and we were all buzzing afterwards.
We were introduced to some common greetings in Japanese and played some games to help reinforce those greetings.

We are trying hard to use as many of the greetings as we can. We spend a few minutes each morning going over the pronunciation and reminding ourselves of when we should use the different greetings. 

We now have a wall display to help us remember our greetings

And we are getting pretty good  at pronouncing and remembering after only two days - listen to this.....