Hi everyone,　皆さん、こんにちは。

My Japanese classes and lessons included the usual kinds of activities that aim to develop speaking, reading, listening, writing and making and performing dialogues. Apart from the usual course book, Genki 1, I used A First Couse in Japanese (by FudekoReekie),Busy People Book 2 in particular. And I used handouts with use of a such language textbooks and others to teach time, words for days of the week, months, dates, names of the products commonly shown at department stores and other shops, foods etc. That also enforced learning use of Hiragana for all classes, and for Beginners 2, Katakana scripts, and some simple Kanji for Pre-Intermediate 1. For keen and hard working Pre-Intermediate 1 class, we did some pages for Kanji learning with use of “Koko-Seikatsu: Kanji Work Book”.

(As I normally ask nearly every class sometime during the courses,) all classes of group lessons made dialogues by pairs or group later in the 10 weeks’ courses (normally about 8 sentences per person) with use of grammar and vocabulary of the unit(s) taught and language taught from the handouts. That practice was very useful and stimulating for students. Also, that will create new interactions among the students and expressions of their own interest and thoughts while using Japanese language.

I taught/asked classes to sing 4 ~ 5 Japanese songs as before, at the start of each lesson. That seemed creating students’ opening their minds instead of being quiet and helping them/class be better prepared for Japanese language/linguistic learning and cultural experiences. I also regard such activityas experiences of feeling a universal perspective and such value since most of the songs sung have sensitivity and compassion to nature and living things and such positive or common healthy thoughts about human life and function.

One of the recently taught songs, i.e. “Song of Crickets” (Koorogi no uta) is beautiful, relaxingand peaceful in the concepts and onomatopoeia used was distinctive. Its English version and onomatopoeia in English was distinctive too. The music of the song was composed by Yasushi Akutagawa, who is a highly known composer and conductor and the music in the CD was recorded impressively with use of occasional insects (crickets’) sound. Those songs were sung with use of the handout written in Hiragana.

1. Also, I informed the majority of my students about the following websites related to Japanese culture, Mt Fuji and Hiragana practice. They are the following.
2. Yomiuri online newspaper shows about 40 video clips with stories about a variety of cute, beautiful animals in Japanese, taken by Japanese animal lovers. Amazing,funny and adorable collection. It is at: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/stream/m_pet/pet021.htm. Titled “BuumuPetto” in Japanese. They can be seen on mobile phones too.
3. The website, http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/adv/fujisan/gallery.htm shows amazing inspiring collection of Mt Fuji. They are excellent photos taken by brilliant photographers.
4. The website, http://www.guidetojapanese.org/pdf/hiragana_trace_sheet.pdf was informed by one of my past students. It has the sheet for Hiragana practice etc. It’ll be good to be used by Beginners’ students.

 

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson

5.10.12