Class Report: How many (Part 3)

Due to last week’s soyokaze entry, I’ll be skipping a week in regard to my fifth graders, but most of the lesson was a game from the previous week anyway, so really you aren’t missing much.  Both Rino and another absent student were able to pick up on eleven through twenty pretty quickly.  It may be the case that they are just fast learners, or they may be going to juku, a kind of cram school students go to at night.  So everyone was up to speed for this lesson.  I should also mention that my homeroom teacher wasn’t at school last week.  As I may have mentioned elsewhere, this is her first year teaching, so apparently there are days when she will be studying rather than teaching.  As a result, I was working with another teacher during this class who wasn’t familiar with the lessons up to this point, giving me even more control and responsibility than usual.

We started with the snakes and ladders game, which we had played the previous week.  The rules were rather complicated and involved playing rock, paper, scissors and advancing a number of places depending on what you won with.  If the student lost, they didn’t move, and the second player played against the third, etc.  If they landed on the bottom of a ladder, they could move up to the top, but the head of a snake made them move down to its tail.  Just like the game I used to play as a kid, though a bit simplified.  I think the kids had a lot of fun playing, though we were only able to play one game before having to move on to the next activity.

The next activity was also fairly confusing for my kids, especially since their teacher wasn’t there to help explain it, though the substitute tried her best to help.  The students chose their favorite kanji and wrote it in a square in their books.  Next, they wrote the stroke count for the kanji.  Each kanji, or pictograph, in Japanese has a certain way in which you’re supposed to draw it.  For instance 犬 is a four stroke kanji while 右 is five strokes.  We asked that the kids chose kanji that had six strokes or less.  They then went around the classroom asking everyone “How many?” meaning how many strokes their kanji was.  Students with the same number wrote each other’s kanji in a third box.  When everyone was finished, I asked how many kanji they had written in the last box, giving them a little more counting practice.

All in all, this wasn’t my favorite lesson, but I think the main point for the day was learning the question sentence, which my kids did.  I told them that from that day on if I ever needed to pass papers to them, I would ask the first student how many they needed for their row.  This took a few tries before a few students understood enough and translated it into Japanese for the rest.  I really hope they understood, because it’s one of the easiest ways to reinforce the concepts in this chapter in future lessons.