Field Trip to the Post Office (郵便局の遠足)

Please have a look at the video below, which shows a journal entry for my three-year-old, who is learning Japanese. The purpose is for me to read it to her so she can remember the different things she did at her Japanese school and can express those things by herself eventually. Journals are a great way to learn a foreign language because they are personal to you and therefore are more accessible as a memory than just a dialog from a textbook. Thus, it helps your long-term retention of new vocabulary. Plus, it's fun.

Respect for the Aged Day

In honor of "Respect for the Aged Day" (Sep 19 in Japan), my daughter's preschool is taking the kids to the post office to mail letters to their grandparents. They get to go up to the counter and buy a stamp and everything! That means at our house we are currently writing letters to her five grandparents, 2 grandmas (obaasan), 1 grandpa (ojiisan), and 2 great grandmas (hiiobaasan). I take dictation and my four-year-old daughter tells me what she wants to write. Here is a sample of what she wrote: "Dear Grandpa, I love you, and have a wonderful day. I love you very much. We went on an airplane. Love, Sheradyn." Have you written to your grandparents lately? Above is a picture of an American woman's gift to her 105-year-old grandmother. Wow!

Halloween Haunted House

Happy Halloween! The haunted house at the school's Halloween party made me laugh because there were Japanese gravestones in it. Japanese gravestones are totally different than typical American ones. For one thing, there's Japanese kanji characters on them, written vertically. Entire families are buried under one headstone after being cremated. Then a few feet away in each direction are other families' headstones. They're very close together, due to Japan's small amount of usable land. Interestingly, Japanese don't associate cemeteries with being scary or spooky, just peaceful.

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