Poly’s Lower School community had the honor of hosting 18 fifth grade students and two teachers from the Ritsumeikan School in Kyoto, Japan. They spent the week visiting with our Poly fifth grade teachers and students. Our new Japanese friends also enjoyed a two-night homestay with our Poly host families. These students traveled to Pasadena to study the American school system and way of life in the United States. During their one-week stay in California, they visited several landmarks within our community.
The fifth grade teachers were excited to add this amazing opportunity as a culminating experience for a new multidisciplinary unit that focused on a social studies unit of study on Japan. Here are some of the activities we enjoyed with our Japanese buddies:
• Five Skype/Facetime sessions prior to their visit;
• Welcome and farewell celebrations in Founders Hall;
• Three “snail mail” pen pal letter exchanges prior to their visit;
• Field trips to Caltech, JPL, the California Science Center, Huntington Gardens, and an evening at an Angels baseball game.
Additionally, this special week included many facets of a cultural exchange, including activities for all the students in PE, music, and art. Our performing arts teachers led our students in performances for our visitors, and they joined us during an art class for a wonderful art lesson.
The morning of our farewell to our new friends from Kyoto, a crowd of students and families joined in for a tearful goodbye. We enjoyed some wonderful anecdotes about the week that revealed how fortunate the Poly community and the Ritsumeikan students are as a result of our excitement to open up our school, our homes, and our hearts. Ritsumeikan’s Hanaue-sensei (assistant principal) and Karin-sensei (English teacher) wrote us the following message upon their arrival back to Japan:
We finally had a chance to sit down together and review the week we spent with you. First, we would like to say that we really appreciated your warm welcome and everything you had planned for us! We would really like to take a group of 15 to 20 fifth-graders again next spring, and we hope that you and/or your students will be able to visit us, too. We loved the lessons you and the other teachers arranged. Everything was so well thought out! Thank you, again, for your warm hospitality.
We all enjoyed a week of appreciating our similarities as well as our differences, learning about each other, and learning from each other. It was an amazing opportunity for our Lower School community!
Until now, the Lower School has integrated Poly’s Global Initiatives Program through our rich cultural units of study. This new partnership with the Ritsumeikan School has provided a new face-to-face cultural exchange opportunity to enhance the program. See more photos from the visit.
Arigato,
Fifth grade teachers Linda Breen and Michelle Garcia
Lower School Director Paula Martin
