Monday, October 7, 2013

Our Next Project

So, as some of you might know, there are three houses on our property (it sounds fancy but it's really like living on a farm in Bakersfield).

We live in this house:


Seisuke's parents live in this house on the other side of our house (sorry it's hard to see...I'll have to take a better pic later):


And then we have this old Japanese house that nobody lives in:


So we decided to convert the old Japanese house (which we call "Gomoku") into an English school. Our main focus is on toddlers and preschoolers, but we might expand eventually to elementary school, junior high, etc.



Here are some of the things I did to get ready:


Lots of handmade teaching materials.

Five little pigs.

An easel-turned-felt-board.

More handmade baby toys.


Here are some of the things I made and purchased for the school. We found this cute rug at Costco!

More felt board pieces.

Picked up some great ESL-recommended books from Amazon.

I think I can get a lot of use out of these books.

Laminated like crazy!

Tons of cutting.

I love that I married a man who owns a laminator!
Made some signage.
Moved the stuff to Gomoku.
Created a play area.
Built a ball/sensory pit out of handmade cushions.

Hung up garlands from Target.

Had a trial lesson with Seisuke's friends' kids!







Got lots of cute pics for the homepage!

And now we have Gomoku's first students! :)

We'll update again after we've made more progress! I'm so excited about this project and we have a lot of young kids in our neighborhood who are interested in signing up! So this is going to be my new job that Seisuke is going to help manage--we hope people love this unique setting and atmosphere!

Honeymoon in New York

Here are some pics from our honeymoon in New York! We would love to go back during a cooler season someday! :)


There was thrifting in Brooklyn.
There was camouflaging.

There was wandering.







There was ice cream.

There was Grand Central.



There was grilled cheese.



There was more ice cream.

There was Fairways.

There was picnicking in Central Park.

There was museum visiting.





There was people watching.


There was grabbing a bite in the lower east side.

There was the Brooklyn Bridge.


There was lounging in our Upper West Side apartment.

There was shopping.




There was lots of smiling. :)

There was heavy lifting.

And here's some of our souvenirs in our house: