The new materials that The Japan Forum has developed, introduced and distributed is your solution to "big change", "enhancement", or the "glue" that brings it all together. The Deai Kit can work into every lesson and activity that you already have, or that you will develop. It can be worked in on large or small scale. You make the decisions, you create and discover how it fits, and your students meet seven Japanese young people while they acquire the language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and at the same time touch the culture through their new Japanese friends. The seven young people on the panels and on the CDs, come alive, and become a "sometimes surprise" of your students' language experience, or an "everyday, familiar, comfort."

Here was a wealth of vocabulary, large, in context and portrayed real life! I didn't have to go searching through magazines, or gathering items from home. By the end of the first month of school, I picked up my curriculum outline and wrote the single word "Yu" on every page. When I did lesson planning I was reminded that I can use "her" to add to activities and methods that I was already using. It even permitted me to "trash" some of the things that I had been doing out of habit, that weren't very effective. I didn't spend excess time to bring her into my lessons, I didn't spend money, and I didn't get rid of all the great things and materials that I have developed that work well. There was no manual to follow on how to use "her", but that was the magic of it. I could be the creator of ideas, and she was there to help me facilitate those ideas in a realistic way that attracts the attention of my students.

By the end of the year, they still did not have the actual story and life of Yu Mizushima. So during the last week of classes when we were reviewing all that we had learned, I introduced (in English) the story and life of Yu in detail, from the materials provided. Each day they learned more about her. By the time they took their final exams, they were ready to write a one page imaginary letter to Yu, telling her that they enjoyed meeting her and what they think of her life. This was done in English. In Japanese they wrote a bit about themselves using the basic language they had acquired. I told them "Yu will be back next year, along with a friend or two". They clapped! At the start of Japanese II these students will be waiting to see "Yu" again, since they hadn't seen her all summer! What a great way to review.

During the same year, I introduced Yu to my Japanese II classes. At the start of the year we were working with how to ask questions. They formed questions in Japanese, trying to find out about this "mystery girl". I had put about a dozen of the panels on the classroom wall. In another activity, they were in groups, and each group had to write as much as they could about who this girl was, her interests, her family, etc. They could invent the story, since they didn't know all the real information yet. It was wonderful for me and the classes to hear each version of who this Japanese girl is! We used the panels for particle "no" and countless other grammatical points. For a cultural activity I put all the panels of Yu around the room. Each student had some blank note cards in hand, and as they silently walked around the room, they wrote a question about anything they wondered about on each card. I collected all of them, and whenever we had time throughout the year, I would take out the question cards and answer them, or encourage the students to answer if they could. This activity was done in English. Once when I had a guest speaker from Japan, the students were asking some questions, but were timid. The second day, I got the question cards out, and my guest answered the questions about Yu that pertained to Japanese culture and lifestyle. Some examples of the questions the students wrote were: What city is she in? Is her family traditional or modern? Do you know her personally? Do Japanese students steal other people's shoes in school? Do they always have uniforms? Is their math as hard as ours? Is it cool to learn English there?, etc. The panels truly encouraged them to wonder and question.