Our School...
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Kanagawa Gakuen (KG) is a private all girls’ junior and senior high school located in the centre of Yokohama. It was founded in 1914 and has about 1,200 students. Both the junior and senior high school are comprised of three year group grades. Each grade is then sub-divided into five homeroom classes with two homeroom teachers and about forty students in each.
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Our school emblem is the cherry blossom. We also have three school pillars. The school pillars are: self awareness, diligence, and peace of mind. |
Junior High School
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We enter the first grade of junior high school at the age of twelve. Our junior high school uniform is a blue sailor’s uniform. The school week runs from Monday to Friday plus a half-day on Saturday mornings. Lessons start at 8:40 in the morning and finish at 3:05 in the afternoon. Each lesson is fifty minutes long and we have a ten minute break between classes. We have 34 lessons a week and study many different subjects. These include, math, Japanese, English, English conversation, science, history, art, social studies, home economics, and music. After the last class of the day, we have a short homeroom period and then we must clean our classrooms. Our Australian pen pals tell us this is very unusual in Australia. But, it’s very common here in Japan.
High School
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We enter the first grade of high school when we are fifteen years old. Our uniform is a dark blue blazer and a striped blue tie. By the time we start high school, we are beginning to think about what we might like to do in the future. In senior one we all study from a set curriculum, but in senior two we are able to make individual decisions about our education. We can choose from a range of elective subjects in the sciences, humanities, and liberal arts fields. In senior three we work very hard towards our entrance exams into university.
Yokohama
Yokohama is the second largest city, by population, in Japan and is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture. Yokohama is a port city and lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo. When Japan opened up to international trading in the late 1800s Yokohama became the center for foreign trade. These days it is a large urban city with many shops, restaurants, parks, and Japan’s largest China Town.