Where's Spot?
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: Aren't those kids cute?
Shogako san-nenseis - that means elementary school third graders, cute as can be. Their teacher was in an August workshop that I taught with some other ALT's. She seemed to take a liking to me and asked me to do an audio-tape of the little story book "Where's Spot?" We presented this little story in the summer workshop. It turns out that one of her students had this story book written in Japanese and had literally worn it out. These kids apparently listened to me reading this story on tape everyday for awhile (not knowing much English but able to follow the pictures) and decided to make their own storybooks. They really wanted to meet me so their teahcer invited me to class. What I didn't know was that this had turned into a demonstration lesson. When I got there, there was a college professor and at least 10 college students observing with video cameras. Good grief, glad I didn't know ahead of time. No time to get nervous. Anyway, I read the story to the kids and they loved it. They showed us their story books that they had made and colored. One group even did a sort of puppet play on the theme.

It was a very rewarding experience and it was a wonderful chance to see a really great elementary school teacher in action. It was a relief to get back to the more familiar junior high kids though. This is where my heart is!

It's hard to believe that these little kids have to learn katakana (44+ symbols and sounds), hiragana (another 40+ symbols and the same sounds) these two systems are similar but some symbols look very different so the same sound like short "a" can have two entirely different symbols. These two syllabaries are only for foreign words and prepostitions and articles. Nouns and ideas are written in Kanji (an ancient Chinese syllabary). The kids learn a part of the over 40,000 symbols in this syllabary. So no wonder that they don't get around to learning Romanji which is our alphabet until later in elementary school. I am constantly amazed that a lot of the kids do know our alphabet at an early age.
If you'd like to see a photo of this cute class click here:Where's Spot