New Years in Japan

With the New Year coming up the fourth graders are learning about how this holiday is celebrated in Japan. One of the Japanese traditions is to send out special New Year's Day postcards called nengajo. These postcards are sent to friends and family to let them know how they are doing. After learning about this the students are designing their own postcards with illustrations and short messages that they can send out to their family and friends.

Here are a couple of websites that have more information about this Japanese tradition:
http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/explore/calendar/december/nengajo.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_New_Year