...fun.

• Games -- real Japanese kids' games, games meant to build vocabulary or drill grammar, drama games, and others
• Music -- traditional and popular Japanese songs; chants for learning conjugations and grammar structures
• Story time -- Japanese fairy tales, children's books, and manga (read by the teacher to begin with, but eventually read by the students)
• Video and audio, ranging from Anpanman cartoons to JR train platform announcements
• Field trips organized in easy Japanese, such as scavenger hunts and a trip to the petting zoo
• All, of course, presented at the level of the class at the time
• Boredom is our biggest enemy. If you snooze, we lose!

...social.

• All in-class activities stress interactivity and socializing with the other students
• Regular language-related social events with explicit goal of using Japanese, even at a very low level.
• Training the muscles of "willingness to communicate". Making mistakes is the fastest way to learn-- we encourage any communication attempts, even ones (or especially ones!) that go awry
• Homework assignments to interact with real people outside of class (first in pairs, then alone)

...creative.

• Arts and crafts will be a large part of class, whether it be in our regular hands-on Calligraphy sessions or one-offs, like making a self-portrait out of construction paper labeling the parts of the body.
• Members of Wide Eyed Theatre Company and Tokyo Comedy Store-J will help the students create their own short plays in Japanese. Every three months, we hold a happyoukai (end-of-term performance). Each student is expected to bring five friends or family, and we put on a show of our new Japanese skills. After which, we all party!

...flexible.

• We recognize that every student is different, and every group is different. So the curriculum will never be set in stone. Instead, we solicit weekly feedback from students about what they enjoy and don't enjoy, and what they feel helps them learn and what doesn't; and we adjust accordingly.