In Japan, the COVID-19 keeps us at home. Our family usually work at home. Our children usually study at home. In addition, our family lives in the countryside, so we have the same everyday life as before. However, all events were canceled this spring. Children feel some stress. We walk 30 minutes every day to stay healthy. Recently we climb a small mountain near our house. It takes 20 minutes to reach the top. ———————————————————————————————————————– A nature trail is near our house. The entrance is a five minute walk from our house. Yesterday we walked through it. Deer or boar teeth.   A place with a great view.   Beautiful […]

Mokkan is wood which mostly was used about from the 6th century to the 8th century. Mokkann is  ancient paper. People wrote letters on it and sometimes they drew pictures. A lot of pieces of  mokkan have excavated. They were used as label, notes, letters, and so on. These are real mokkan. They are about 1200 years old. You can look at kanji characters. They were excavated in Heijokyo in Nara. Heijokyo was Japanese capital in the 8th century. And now there is the historic park there. This is restored gate. I joined the project,” Let’s go seeing Mokkan in Nara! 2019″, which was held at Heijokyo with my mother […]

We have a kitchen garden. I grew a lot of vegetables there last year. Particularly I wanted to make many tomato. My neighbor sometimes give me delicious tomato juice. And I wanted to make them. So I asked my mother, “Can you buy some tomatoes? I want to make tomato juice.” She said, “I will not buy a lot of tomatoes.” So I decided to I would grow tomatoes. But I grew different vegetables at first. I first grew strawberries, pimento, and so on. Then I grew tomatoes. I went to the kitchen garden every day and pulled weeds for about one hour. I harvested a lot of tomatoes last […]

One day, Daughters asked me to purchase the old clothes of kimonos in the auction (21 cloths including Haori and so on). Because they were described as recycling and materials, I said “There may be few items to wear”. My daughters say, “We wear them when we will play outside. We will cut it and use it . It is not important that they are dirty or crumbled. ” Soon I purchased them. I was surprised at them, because many of them were able to be worn. Daughters drew the designs of their favorite costumes in advance. They cut them roughly for the designs. Itsumi sewed them with the sewing […]

Hiromi and I often go to the mountain behind our home. We love it very much. It is good for playing. We climb the steep slope. The weeds grow on the mountain, but we go there. Hiromi was climbing the slope in the weeds. Hiromi was playing on the natural slide. She like the slide. We walked here and there in the mountain. I climbed the tree.The tree is tall. I climb the tree whenever we come here. I have to hold the limbs strongly. Then I can climb the tree. The tree is very tall so it is dangerous. But still I like to climb trees!      

Learning is not only from text books. We can learn much from various activities. We think activities are very important for dou-learning. They are learning by experiences. Experiences are what make us human beings. We feel, think, act, work together and accomplish the task with pleasure and satisfaction. We have so many books, about over 20,000 books. We are in trouble about the space of books. So, we have built our library. Of course by ourselves. At first, we took down an old cabin. In the following picture, Hasumi and Hiroya worked.   After we got rid of the old cabin, we made the base of pillars and walls. We […]