We live in this house:
Seisuke's parents live in this house on the other side of our house (sorry it's hard to see...I'll have to take a better pic later):
And then we have this old Japanese house that nobody lives in:
So we decided to convert the old Japanese house (which we call "Gomoku") into an English school. Our main focus is on toddlers and preschoolers, but we might expand eventually to elementary school, junior high, etc.
Here are some of the things I did to get ready:
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| Lots of handmade teaching materials. |
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| Five little pigs. |
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| An easel-turned-felt-board. |
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| More handmade baby toys. |
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| Here are some of the things I made and purchased for the school. We found this cute rug at Costco! |
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| More felt board pieces. |
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| Picked up some great ESL-recommended books from Amazon. |
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| I think I can get a lot of use out of these books. |
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| Laminated like crazy! |
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| Tons of cutting. |
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| I love that I married a man who owns a laminator! |
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| Made some signage. |
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| Moved the stuff to Gomoku. |
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| Created a play area. |
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| Built a ball/sensory pit out of handmade cushions. |
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| Hung up garlands from Target. |
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| Had a trial lesson with Seisuke's friends' kids! |
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| Got lots of cute pics for the homepage! |
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| And now we have Gomoku's first students! :) |
We'll update again after we've made more progress! I'm so excited about this project and we have a lot of young kids in our neighborhood who are interested in signing up! So this is going to be my new job that Seisuke is going to help manage--we hope people love this unique setting and atmosphere!
