2017年9月24日日曜日

2017/9/3 Multicultural Playgroup Ichigo-Ichie Report

(日本語でのレポートはこちら)

The 13th meeting took place at Café Kokoraku on a sunny Sunday of September the third.

Fifty-five adults and kids from Mexico, the U.S.A., Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, and Japan came to join our meeting and we all had fun together.


We began our meeting by singing a song, “If you’re happy and you know it” in a rock version. I just loved that cool intro with clapping! We surely rock’n rolled, didn’t we?

Now we were ready to start our discussion. Naoko gave a beautiful presentation on the day's topic “Children’s after-school activities.”

After-school activities- a lot of choices

You can see the slides from the presentation here.
Piano, abacus, ballet, swimming, English, calligraphy, Karate practice and many more. These are some of the after-school activities that kids take part in here in Japan.    
 
To add to these typical activities, dancing, computer programming and Shogi (Japanese chess) are becoming trendy these days.

Some statistics show nearly half of the 4-year-old age group engage in at least one of these after-school activities and the ratio goes up to more than 80% among the 6-year-old age group.

Swimming, English, piano, tutoring school, and gymnastics are the most popular activities among pre-school and school-going kids.

Good sides and downsides

Parents spend 3000-20000 yen monthly per each activity. They also spend time ferrying their children around. And there’s always a question of ‘what if they don’t like to go?’

Of course, parents choose after-school activities for their kids for many good reasons.

Some activities are believed to be brain stimulating, others help kids learn P.E. at school or help them become musical, acquire some special skills and so on.

But the more they engage in after-school activities, the less free time they have. Please remember it’s essential for both toddlers and young children to have plenty of “unstructured time” for their healthy growth.

And don’t forget to spend some time and money for themselves!

After-school activities around the globe

Taking a glance at other parts of the globe, foreign languages are popular in Asian countries. For example, English is popular in Vietnam, Taiwan, China, and Korea.

In European countries such a the U.K., France, and Germany, they prefer to be more musical such as taking violin, cello, flute and singing lessons.

In Australia, more sports are picked up and Chinese is becoming the “in” thing to learn. In Mexico, dancing and Karate practice is popular.

Thanks for sharing all the information!

<Greetings in Malaysian!>

Rina helped us learn some greetings in Malaysian; we tried "hello", "good night", "thank you", "see you" and more!

<Story time>

Meg from Australia read us a book titled Where is the Green Sheep? Lots of lovely sheep showed up and we were absorbed in warm, fuzzy feelings!

Upcoming meeting

Our next meeting will be on Sunday, December the third at Cafe Kokoraku.

A couple of mothers from Australia are going to tell us about the summer Christmas in their country.

Let's go find out about their summer wonderland and get hot together!


(Reported by Mariko,   proofread by James, and photos by Shinichiro)