My last visit to this preschool for this year was a lot less emotional and sentimental than I thought it would be. I guess I was spoilt last year, when the kids who were 'graduating' preschool did a dance for me on my last visit. But this year, it went by without much fuss, which was probably a good thing.
But anyways, while it is fun playing with kids, I think the other half of the enjoyment I get from visiting schools is seeing the different things and ways kids are taught here compared to back home. There's the uber-adorable kyushoku song, which is the song they sing before they eat so kids can practice saying the set expression before eating, and there's also the way in which the 5-year-olds were taught how to remember what they were playing in the mini-drum band. Rather than having music sheets, the kids read off an illustrated poster, which had faces of anpanman, fruits, and other random objects. When students played the drums, they memorised the order of all the random objects, and hit the drums in accordance to however many syllables there were for each picture (strawberry, or ichigo, had 3 syllables, so they had to hit the drums for 3 beats and rest on the 4th beat).
But my favourite educational tool seen so far is this board game, that depicts the digestive system, and tracks how food starts off as food, and ends up in poo. And, being Japan, it involves illustrations of happy poo characters. I'm getting a feeling that Japan has a strange obsession with cute faecal matter...
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