Head, Shoulders, Knees, and all that

Santa Claus: Lost in Japan

If you're looking to spice up your children's Christmas party this year (maybe cutting it close) or want to start planning ahead for next year, here's a suggestion...make a video of Santa on his way to the party.  It builds a lot of anticipation for Santa's arrival and the kids really love to see Santa out and about in their own neighborhood.

We captured some video of Santa getting lost on his way to our Christmas parties in Tokyo and Yokohama this year, making sure to catch him around some areas our students know well...our classroom, the park, on the train, KFC, etc.  We edited it together into seven segments separated by static and checked in at various points throughout the party, as if checking a live satellite feed, to see where Santa was.  Here's  a video of all the segments edited together...11 minutes long so grab a cup of coffee! 

For those who have never been to Japan, you might want to check out how nice and clean the convenience stores are, the style of the houses in the neighborhood, a Mom riding her bike with her son in the child seat on back (something you see a lot of...often with one child in front and one in back...it's really nice...cars are just much less a part of daily life for most folks in Japan as compared with the States), what a typical neighborhood park looks like, how the kids respond to KFC by yelling out "Ken-tu-cky" (chicken is the popular choice for Christmas here and KFC does HUGE business around the 25th...notice Colonel Sanders in his Santa suit), what a typical residential train station looks like, and how immaculate the taxi is (complete with the standard automatic door).

Ursprache, U-R-S-P-R-A-C-H-E

What is an ursprache?  A language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages, of course!  And also, the winning word at the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Every month or so I lead a reading and discussion circle with some great children's English teachers in Tokyo who are always looking to brush up on their English, and today the topic of spelling bees came up.    The Japanese "alphabet" is phonetically consistent, so spelling bees are pretty much a foreign concept in Japan, although there are other contests, notably soroban (Japanese abacus) contests. 

The National Spelling Bee (spelling contest) is a VERY high pressure event.  Kids compete in school events, then community events, then city/county/state events before eventually making it to the finals, which are televised on national TV.  This year, there were even casinos taking bets on who would win.  The words the kids spell are mostly words the average native English speaker doesn't even know.  Have a look at the words the winner Katharine Close spelled during the contest:

1.    (Written round)
2.    gobemouche
3. Galilean
4. chiragra
5. Bildungsroman
6. terrene
7. cucullate
8. synusia
9. towhee
10. Shedu
11. hukilau
12. clinamen
13. recrementitious
14. psittacism
15. aubade
16. kanon
17. izzat
18. tmesis
19. kundalini
20. Ursprache

To give you a better idea of the kind of pressure many of the kids are under, have a look at what happened when they asked this 13 year-old to spell alopecoid in the contest 2 years ago.

 

For more on the spelling bee and its recent popularity, check out this week's NY Times article.

The Big Sneeze

We were working on reading some s-blends in some of my classes this week (stop, skip, skate, snow, etc.) and then serendipitously (I believe that's the first time I've ever used that word), my fellow teacher Tanja showed me this classic Electric Company clip.

Yep, that's Morgan Freeman way before he became, well, MORGAN FREEMAN.  For any readers outside of the U.S. who may be unfamiliar with The Electric Company, it was a very, very cool educational program that ran on American Public Television in the 1970s.  Mr. Freeman was a regular cast member on the show.

Anyhow, I ended up introducing the word sneeze in a few classes.  Talking about sneezing with my students in Japan is interesting for a c0uple of reasons.  One, they have a hard time believing that Americans say, "Ah-choo" when we sneeze (Japanese  people say something sounding close to "hak-shun" when they sneeze.)  Also, in Japan, nobody says "bless you" or "guzundheit" after you sneeze.  Just silence.  That was a hard one for me to get used to, and it's not easy explaining to adults or young students why people in many western countries say "bless you" after a sneeze.

There is an expression in Japan (not sure exactly how it goes) that says if you sneeze once, it means someone is praising you; if you sneeze twice, it means someone is criticizing/saying bad things about you; if you sneeze three times, it means you are being scolded; and if you sneeze four times or more, well, it means you have a cold.

I wonder what it means if you sneeze like Morgan did.

Update:  Wow!  More serendipity.  I didn't know this when I posted, but it's Morgan Freeman's birthday today.   Happy 69th Morgan!

Update #2:  Mama Lisa has more on sneezing: How do you sneeze in your country?

Golden Week

Golden Week in Japan, a week in which several holidays are clustered together resulting in a week off for many, kicks off today with Greenery Day.  Other Golden Week holidays are Constitution Day and Children's Day.

It's a bit crazy during holiday weeks in Japan...a bit like Thanksgiving weekend in the US.  Everybody is traveling.  Tokyo is an interesting place to be during the holidays because this very busy city suddenly loses like half its population.  Many Tokyoites aren't from Tokyo, so many go back to their hometowns over the holidays.  And many of those whose hometown is Tokyo  head off somewhere else for a quick vacation. 

I will be enjoying the relative peace and quiet in Tokyo during Golden Week, but I'll be on vacation from the internet.  So, see you soon.  Have a happy Golden Week!

Densha moment

Listeners to National Public Radio in the US coined the phrase Driveway Moment to refer to those times when you are listening to an engrossing story on the radio, arrive at your destination, and rather than turn off the radio, stay in your car and listen to the end of the story. 

In Japan, I experience Densha (train) Moments, when I'm so engrossed in a book I completely lose sense of time and space and end up going 3 stations past my stop before I snap to (nori-sugosu in Japanese.)  Yesterday, I had my first iPod Densha Moment, while listening to an NPR podcast nonetheless.

On my way home from work yesterday, I was listening to NPR's most e-mailed stories of the day podcast.  After a couple of interesting but unremarkable stories, on came a piece entitled called Out of Hiding, Into the World: Thembi's AIDS Diary that just floored me.  When it was over, I "came to" and realized I had missed my stop.  My eyes had been open, my nose wasn't in a book, I had just been so captured by the story that I lost sense of my surroundings.

This post has nothing to do with Kids' Music or Early Childhood Education.  But if you've got 23 minutes to spare, give it a listen.

Doll Festival

Today is Hina Matsuri (Doll Festival) in Japan, also known as Girl's Day.  Check out Mama Lisa for more.