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When
we first resumed the communication between
Marshfield and Senmaya in 2002, the students of Senmaya Elementary
School mailed a wonderful package to our classroom at the South River
School in Marshfield. Our students were tremendously excited to
receive this package with Japanese writing all over it! This
package was filled with toys, snapshots of the students, English
messages written by the students, and drawings.
These charming drawings show the areas around
the school and town, and told us much about Senmaya and Japan. In
addition, the drawings had Japanese and English captions. This
started our practice in Marshfield of trying our best to write some
Japanese with the drawings that we sent back to Senmaya. Although
communicating with students with a very different language can be
thought of as a challenge, children seem to naturally see this as fun!
Many times the students in Marshfield commented that since "they
wrote to us in English", it's only fair that we try to write back in
Japanese.
We are very grateful
to the students in Senmaya for leading the way for us in making this
important effort and showing us that different languages really say the
same things!
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