This September, my son and I started to participate in online classes organized by Swedish school in Tokyo. My son has joined a group where the focus is to better learn letters, easy reading and writing as well as general Swedish culture. He has really enjoyed being part of this group with other Swedish speaking children in Japan, and looking back at this semester I can see that it has been valuable to have become part of a community where knowing Swedish is a prerequisite. It has given both of us extra motivation to improve, me as a teacher and my son as my student, and the ”homework” we get to do together have helped us create even more structure for our Swedish language project.
Two things stand out that my son has particularly enjoyed this fall. One is listening to Swedish children’s books. We got access to a website with a lot of books, possible to read but also listen to while looking at the images. For my son who has gotten used to hearing only me read to him every day, it has been valuable to listen to other voices and other ways of reading. Then we have the word-images homework we really had fun doing together. The task was to create words using objects of what the words describe, like using toy cars to write the word car in Swedish. We did a lot of words and took photos of them that we shared with the class. Then our teacher put it all together into a little pdf-book. It is a happy memory if the first semester in “school”, and now we look forward to the next semester starting in January. Until then, some well deserved Christmas holiday!
