St. Joseph’s has continued to maintain links with our ‘Friendship School,’ Doshisha Elementary in Kyoto. The students at our two schools have communicated with each other recently and valued the experience of practicing their language skills, meeting new friends and seeing school life in another country. 

Sarah

‘Year 5 classes received letters from Doshisha Elementary School students in Japan. They had questions in the letters and Year 5’s wrote letters back with answers. A few days later, some of our classes were able to speak to the Doshisha students on a Google Meet. We were able to ask our own questions using Japanese. Everyone enjoyed it and we hope to do this again another time.’

Frankie

‘We received letters from three classrooms at Doshisha. The classes are called Hardy, Davis and Learned. We answered very simple questions like:  How old are you? What pets do you have?

Deguchi Sensei linked us on Google accounts so we could hop onto our Chromebooks and talk to the Japanese students and speak Japanese to them. In the background we could see that they had received our letters. They were very fluent at speaking English and understood what we said.  We got to practice our Japanese which was a good experience.’