This Japan: Land of the Rising Sun Project began by reading The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck as a read aloud to my third grade class, which takes place in Japan. They became mesmerized by the tsunami that wipes out a family of fisherman and terraced rice paddy fields. We went on the Internet and researched tsunamis and then we looked on a map to see where this tsunami hit. With further research we found that Japan was also prone to earthquakes because it sits on 3 of the earth’s plates and when these plates rub together you have an earthquake. Five years ago Kobe, Japan was the site of a major earthquake. It seems only natural that we should continue to study Japanese culture, as it is one of the requirements of 3rd grade curriculum to study communities around the world. The children were driving the curriculum and therefore it was easy for them to own the knowledge of the curriculum. Their taste buds were whet.
In addition to the areas presented by this HyperStudio stack, we studied many curriculum areas of Japanese culture:
The literacy focus was about Japan. We read Sadako and 1000 Cranes; we read several books by Allen Say who is a Japanese children's author. We also learned how to do origami and made paper cranes. We learned how to write Haiku and we learned how tool write Japanese ideographs and they wrote some simple sentences. The children learned how Japanese writing is written vertically and western writing is from left to right. The class wrote haiku and entered a haiku contest at the Japan Society.
We studied yen and in math we did conversions from dollars to yen and yen to dollars. The children noticed that Mt Fuji is on the yen. We compared the population of Japan with the United States.
The class discussed the political system and discovered that Japan is a democracy with a parliament and in addition they have an emperor.