Japanese

Konnichiwa!

Masae-sensei (Ms. Masae) is the Japanese teacher at Tecoma Primary School. Students from Foundation to Grade 6 participate in a 45-minute session each week. Our Japanese program encourages students to learn the language through a wide range of activities such as songs, games, speaking sessions, reading quizzes, cooking, cultural demonstrations, writing hiragana, origami, artistic expression, listening games and collaborative activities.

In Term 2;

Foundation students will continue to learn to communicate in Japanese including the Japanese meal greetings and numbers (1-10) in Kanji characters through the Unit ‘itadakimasu!’ (pre-meal greeting). This learning unit introduces a lot of animal names and the counters for animals in Japanese. Foundation students will participate in fun hands-on activities as well as learning the words and phrases with the help of gestures and mnemonics.

Both grade 1 and 2 students will continue to explore transport words, sentences and the Hiragana letters through the unit ‘ittekimasu!’(greeting on leaving). This unit introduces the 4 key phrases for farewells and welcomes at the door. The students also will learn to address what transport they would use to get to their destination entirely in Japanese.

Grade 3 and 4 students will have an opportunity to develop their reading and writing skills of Japanese script through the unit ‘odaijini!’ which is a situation dialogue at the doctor’s. The students will learn to address symptoms incorporating their knowledge of body parts in Japanese. They also think about the treatments or suggestions which doctors would provide.

Grade 5 and 6 students are going to explore Japanese culture and the language through the unit ‘Homestay’. This unit will be a great opportunity for them to look back on how far they have come after years of learning Japanese and all the memories of the primary school years. The students will also focus on the phonetic rules of the combination of Hiragana letters.