Class Report: Soyokaze Special

Last Tuesday was Tanabata here in Japan.  It also happened to be the day I was scheduled to teach the soyokaze (special needs) kids.  I was told just before class started that we would be having a short culture time before my lesson by helping decorate the kids’ tanabata bamboo.  After our introductions, the kids brought out the bamboo and several decorations including little pieces of colored paper with their wishes written on them.  I’m pretty sure that Shiori wished for many DS games and Risa wanted to make lots of friends.  After everything was gathered on their desk, we started to decorate.

The whole thing reminded me a bit of Christmas.  Everyone gathered around the bamboo and started putting on decorations.  All the decorations were brightly colored and it made for a really vibrant and festive piece.  I kept asking my kids where I should place the decorations.  Since they’re young and small, they wanted me to put the decorations on the top of the bamboo and squealed with delight when I tied one to the upper most branch.  Shiori eventually brought out a chair to stand on so she could place one of her wishes a bit higher up.  When we were all finished, we took a picture together in front of the bamboo.  Shiori and Risa were both a bit hesitant to stand near me, so I had to pull them in a bit closer.  It made me really happy that I could share that experience with them.

The rest of class was spent learning how to ask and answer the question, “What’s this?”  As I’ve said, I tend to run the soyokaze class like an elementary class.  I brought in my black box, a box with one side cut out and a hole on the top.  One student stood behind the box and closed their eyes while the other put something small, like a pencil or pen, into the box.  The first student reached into the hole on top of the box and tried to guess what was inside.  Both of them did really well, though ruler is a really hard word for them. 

Next, I gave everyone, including the teacher, a piece of paper.  I told them they could draw a picture of anything whose English word they knew, but that it was a secret to everyone else.  We all went off to different parts of the room to draw our pictures.  When we were done, we held up our pictures with most of the paper folded over, hiding it.  We gradually revealed our picture in increments, each time asking “What’s this” and having the others guess. It was a lot of fun, and a good indication for me of what vocabulary they remembered.  I drew grapes that, rather surprisingly, Risa got very quickly.  Shiori drew a cat, her favorite animal.  The teacher drew a car, which I wasn’t aware my kids knew.  Lastly, Risa drew a panda, which the teacher actually guessed correctly on accident.  This class was a lot of fun and I look forward to the next time I get the opportunity to teach it.