Letter #2 (July 2, 2014)
Dear parents,
We have come half way through our summer class, and have developed a friendly class atmosphere, which makes class run smoothly, though students' backgrounds are various. They are sincere to learn and co-operative.
We practiced introducing ourselves with courtesy expressions, and telling our personal information: grade, age, family members, pets we have or don't have pets, but what we like or want to have, our birthday, what color we like and favorite sports. Useful expressions: May I do .…?, I understand/don't understand, What is that?, etc. and courtesy expressions were introduced, and have been used in real situations. Greetings for the different times of the day, state of our being, telling the weather conditions and the date: calendar year, month, the day of the month and the day of the week have been also used daily after we learned them. The names of our body parts were introduced for expressing our health conditions, etc. We learned some adjectives: sizes, tastes, feelings such as enjoyable, glad, hungry, easy, hard, beautiful, cute, fast, etc., and we have been using them in our actual situations. We are also using past tense. Counters for people, animals, thin objects and Japanese original counting were introduced.
We learned the locations and the names of the four main Japanese islands and Okinawa, and the flag of Japan with a song. We expressed we speak/speak a little or don't speak Japanese at home, after learning what languages they speak in Japan and USA. Four seasons and climate of Japan were introduced.
As for cultural learning, we learned about tsuyu (the rainy season), taue (rice planting) and songs for this season in June. We have been making hydrangea origami pictures. We enjoyed shuuji (calligraphy/brush writing), making musubi, miniature ikebana (flower arrangements), playing gomoku-narabe (five in a row), and experienced cha-no-yu (the tea ceremony). We have fun to practice the folk story skit " Ikkyuu-san".
We have been making a hiragana chart, and practicing reading some words.
Thank you for your continuing support.
Sincerely,
Takako Thompson