My son is 9 years old. His summer vacation has just started. Do you know what Japanese summer vacation is like? Today, I’ll introduce a typical Japanese summer vacation for elementary school students.
40-day-vacation, too long!
The vacation is so long. It continues for about 40 days. Children usually bring a lot of homework back home. It’s the parent’s responsibility to make children finish all of their homework by the vacation ends.
I want my son to manage homework properly, I created a chart for him. I hope he sees this chart and does homework spontaneously. Let’s see how it will work! Up to now, it hasn’t been working though. lol
How we get Chinese characters
Can you imagine how Japanese children learn Chinese characters? Typically, children start to learn reading and writing from 6-7 years old, the 1st grade of elementary school.
First, they learn from Hiragana and Katakana (both are the basic Japanese characters), and next, they start to learn Chinese characters. I think you know there are countless Chinese characters. In Japan, students learn those from which the most frequent use. The number of Chinese characters students learning are 80 pieces in the 1st grade, 160 pieces in the 2nd grade and 200 pieces in the third grade. They keep up learning new Chinese characters every year until they graduate high school.
I’ll show you my son’s notebook for practicing Chinese characters. He keeps practicing up Chinese characters at school and home every day. Children practice writing the same Chinese character hundreds of times!
Arithmetic in Japan, the way of calculation
The way of calculation is different in each country. In Japan, we use this kind of method. The picture below shows the way of division. Do you calculate with a different way?
The sight of the park in early morning
In summer vacation, children get up early morning and go to the park. For what? For doing the radio calisthenics. What is the radio calisthenics?? It is said that the radio calisthenics established to keep health and physical fitness in 1928. Even now, we do the radio calisthenics on the sports day at school and summer vacation.
At the nearest park, children living neighborhood get together and do radio calisthenics. Today, it was my turn to bring a radio in the park and supervise children. I stamped a card to those who came. The end of the vacation, children can get sweets as a reward. The one who is perfect attendance can get more sweets than others.