Learn About Japan

I wanted to assess what students had learned about Japan. In pairs they brainstormed words they had learned. When they had listed 5, they put their hands on their heads and I called them down to the carpet. They had to choose a word from their list and give me a quick explanation of why they listed that word. They then wrote this word on a post-it note and we put it on our poster. They returned to their tables and began again, when they had 5 new words, they put their hands back on their heads. I have never seen my students so excited about making a list. It did become a bit of a competition, however each student had at least two opporunities to write on a post-it note. The end result looked really effective too and is now on display near the school office.

As a class we made a KWL chart. For those who are not familiar with these, they are charts that display What we KNOW about Japan (K), What we WANT to learn about Japan (W) and What we have LEARNED about Japan at the end of the unit (L). Students also made their own personal KWL charts in their books to track their own learning and have a record of where we started from. We don't always start a unit in this way, but I do feel it is important to discover what students already know and what they want to know, in any way that works best for your classroom.
I have also since seen a KWLH chart. The addition of the H, is How we learned the information. This question of 'How' is becoming more and more important, as we focus on helping students to understand how and why they learn particular things. If students understand how they have learned something, they are able to transfer these skills to another area, and impact greatly on their future learning.

We celebrated Children's Day this week. It is celebrated earlier in the year in Japan, however as we are learning about festivals, it was relevant to us now. You can read up on Children's Day from Wikipedia, if you would like to find out more. These carp windsocks or koinobori are displayed all around Japan for children's day.
I found a template for these kites on Acitivity Village (http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/carp_kite_craft.htm). I drew some tabs on the left hand side of the paper, beside the eyes. When my students had coloured the kites in, we placed a glitter pipecleaner under the tabs and taped them down. We added streamers to the tail end of the fish. Some students also chose to staple the paper together in the middle. We threaded a piece of wool under the pipecleaner and tied the ends of the wool together. They look really great hanging in our classroom.

I found these templates online. There are plenty of websites where flags can be found, or you can draw your own. Some of my students chose to rip crepe paper and glue onto their flags, while others simply coloured theirs. We glued them onto coloured paper and displayed them around our KWL chart.