Shirogane Primary School - Day 3

Today was our third and final day at Shirogane Primary School. Once again the weather today was great, although very windy in the afternoon. (Our Japanese friends say that is good - the wind will have blown away all of the clouds, and the view from the Tokyo Skytree tomorrow should be clear. Hopefully we will be able to see Mt Fuji from the observation deck.)

Today it was the Year 3 class' turn to host us in Periods 1 and 2. They organised a shuuji (Japanese calligraphy with brush and ink) lesson. As for all of our other activities, we broke up into eight groups, and the students introduced themselves to each other in Japanese and English. Then it was time to get started. We began with some very simple kanji (Chinese characters), and our Year 3 "teachers" showed us how to set up the paper with a paper weight, hold the brush properly and the correct order of the strokes in each character. It's not as easy as it looks! The first few characters were practised on a pre-printed sheet to give us a guidelineas to where to start and finish each stroke, then when we were a bit more confident we moved to a blank piece of paper. In the second half of the lesson we tried some much more complicate dcharacters, with as many as thirteen separate strokes. We finished off by choosing our best piece of work and showing it to the class.