BELMONT PRIMARY SCHOOL

In Room 7 we have been focusing on using adjectives to describe something. The use of adjectives in Japanese grammar is a bit different from English, so we have been comparing and labelling the adjectives for colours into two groups. We then looked at the different colours of animals using the book ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?’ in Japanese. Additionally, we have used verbs to express what we are doing, and where we are going. Finally, we have learnt various ways to describe things we like and dislike.

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In Room 4 we have been learning to sing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes in Japanese. We also played Simon Says to help us remember our body parts vocabulary. We learnt about how describing the noises animals make is different in Japanese when compared to English. For example, wan wan is a dog’s bark, and nyan is a cat’s meow. We also have learnt how to express what colours and animals we like, as well as what someone other than ourself likes.

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In Room 3 we have been focusing on the first 20 numbers in Japanese and learning a Counting Song to count forward and backwards from 10. We did some revision of colours before focusing on the topic of food. We looked at how various foods are in Katakana, one of the three Japanese alphabets, which is used for borrowed words. Many students were able to guess what the foods were before we started, I was very impressed. Examples being, remon for lemon, chokoretto for chocolate and keeki for cake.

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In Room 1 we have been learning a Greetings Song to say ‘Good morning, hello, goodbye, and see you tomorrow’ in Japanese. We started to learn how the Japanese alphabet is structured via vowel sounds and practiced writing the first 5 letters. We also learnt numbers and colours through various songs. Finally, we learnt about Japanese culture through the folk tale story Peach Boy (Momotaro), and looked at how Japanese people greet each other by bowing, how Japanese people eat with chopsticks, sleep on the floor on top of Futon beds, and various other things like sushi and hot springs.

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During Semester 1 all students at Belmont Primary explored Japanese culture by learning about festivals such as Children’s Day (Kodomo No Hi) and Doll’s Festival (Hina Matsuri). We also looked at the Japanese national flower, the sakura, or cherry blossom. We created our own carp flag (Koi No Bori) and samurai helmet (kabuto) origami, as well as made a crafted sakura tree which will be displayed in the Japanese classroom.

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Victoria Keranxi

Japanese LOTE teacher