Rei the reader!

I want to read!

Adopting Oxford Phonics World as our 'go to' phonics resource/series at Luna International was a no brainer, especially with covid-induced needs for online resources/presentation tools. We love the clarity of the materials, the logical presentation & progression. I am not a fan of the North American drawl that undermines accurate pronunciation in the audio of some units...but, I am very picky.

Unfortunately, we now have little brothers & sisters not even needing to come to Luna because they've grabbed a sibling's classbook and submerged themselves into the learning!

Screen time smasher!

Big brother Yoshi I have known since kindy...and he's been learning with us at Luna as well for a quite while now. He used to hide behind his classmates & not say 'boo' to a goose, but no more - a confident reader, neat writer & speller, and almost glib with answering too easy questions! Loosing games no longer a 'problem' either :)

I've been told his five-year old brother Rei is #OPW fan number one! As you can see, he's an independent learner...and has had to have a home screen time limit for the OPW app imposed to 15 minutes (maximum!) daily. Oh my word - if only we had that 'problem' with our students :)

I blame his parents..

Not fair?

As you can see in the pic above & videos below, Rei is an independent learner already. So, dad will be out of a job soon (as well as me!). 

Just imagine if every five year old in Japan had this kind of leg-up from mum & dad before they even get to elementary school? Game changer! Goodbye 'romaji' crap & katakana cribbing. Well done mum & dad...and thank you dad for choosing Luna International again for your family...like your parents asked me to teach you & your buddies when you were at elementary school.

Turbo-charged learning like this could/should be a game-changer for Japanese children. Tragically, I doubt very many decision makers within MEXT or BoE have the first clue about how vital a grasp of phonics is...especially with the ongoing race to the bottom which is 'providing' language teaching to children in kindergarten & elementary schools (and JHS/HS) from the lowest bidder/freshest face on zoom or YouTube/flashiest app on some administrator's TikTok feed. 

Nagano fails to protect against bullying

This article appears in full in the Daily Yomiuri.

I have paraphrased it - our local Board of Education should be hanging its head in shame. Ten years since the law was passed. That is a generation of school kids still not being protected as they legally and morally should be.

"Municipal boards of education in 389 cities, towns and villages have not established procedures to suspend students for bullying or violent behavior at school, despite being required by law to do so, according to the education ministry.


The School Education Law was revised in 2001 in the wake of a spike in cases of serious bullying and violence in schools, obliging municipal boards of education to set rules for such students to be temporarily barred from attending primary or middle schools.

The ministry conducted the survey in December, in the wake of the suicide in October of a sixth-grade primary school girl who had been bullied at a school in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture.

"The priority should be protecting the lives of the victims of bullying. Aren't there some cases where officials should be brave enough to bar students from attending school?" asked Midori Komori, director of Gentle Heart Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing bullying. 

Komori's daughter killed herself at age 15 in 1998 in Kanagawa Prefecture.

In Nagano Prefecture, more than 70 percent of the municipal boards of education have not taken the required action."