Japanese in an American School

Hello all,

Before I get to my question, a little bit of background. I'm volunteer tutoring at an elementary school, and have found myself in a bit of a difficult situation. The school requested a Japanese language tutor, which at first I thought meant for a class teaching Japanese, but it turns out it's for a 5th grade student that doesn't speak much English. I'm going to see if I can find/get a native speaker to take this one over, but honestly, the chances of that happening are almost nil.

My question, then... Can anyone point out any good math resources I could consult to learn Japanese terminology on the subject? (Kanji is 100% OK). Or alternatively, some resources I could print off to help the student?

It's 5th grade (pre?) algebra, incidentally. Today they learned about the Distributive Property, if that helps provide a reference point. Of course, I'll google it myself, but I wanted to see if anyone here might know a few good resources.

Winterfell,

First of all, if you need that question to be answered, you can try contacting your local Japanese Counsil to see if there are any Japanese communities, Japanese schools or Japanese book shops that can help you solve your problem. But I assume that good dictionaries are good enough to translate math terms for 5th graders. Google ‰pŽ«˜Y for one.

But let me get this straight. Are you saying that they hired you to teach this student math? Or did they hire you to support the student's studies in general?

When I was in 2nd grade, I was a Japanese student in an American school who didn't speak English at all. The school hired several volunteers to tutor me for an hour a day or so. One of the less helpful were native Japanese tutors, because their English wasn't good enough. There was little to learn from them. The best were tutors who only spoke basic Japanese, but were skillful English reader class teachers, because what I needed to learn was English.

Basically, what the tutors did was to make me read out loud reader class text books. At first I was clueless about the contents. I just repeated the tutor's pronunciation. Gradually, I learned how to pronounce words, and then I began to understand what they meant, and then I learned to write. And THEN, math automatically became very easy for me, because all I had to do was to read the text books and figure out what I was supposed to do. By 5th grade, I was teaching other (American) students math and was being rewarded for it.

If I may say so, I'm not really sure if translating math terms to Japanese will help this student, because what this student needs is to do is to do well in his American school and not to do well when he goes back to Japan. That part will be taken care of by his parents. All he needs to do concerning math is to understand what he is learning. He doesn't have to understand them in Japanese.

Hope it helps.

Sorry, I should have been a little clearer. This is purely volunteer tutoring. Only an hour a week, and for math rather than reading, for better or worse. It takes place during classtime, so it's really support rather than directly teaching. Thanks for your advice.

Thanks for the response. I'm sure you can still get away with simple words like"kakeru (multiply)" or "waru (devide)" and explain all the rest in plain Japanese and English math terms. Good luck.