Nara School System
By Arina Nakamura, Nozomi Imaeda, Yuusuke Tanaka and Mayuko Itaya
Most Japanese children enter kindergarten when they are three or four years old. Some children go to kindergarten and other children don’t go. Their parents can choose whether to have their children attend or not.
But when children are six years old, they must go to school because of compulsory education.
In elementary school, there are six grades. We move up to the following grade in April. That’s when the new school year begins in Japan. Most of elementary school children have the same bags called “Randoseru” in Japanese.
Next, children are admitted to a junior high school. There are three grades in junior high. During that time, we study further and start learning English.
With our graduation from junior high school, compulsory education is over. So we must take an entrance examination to get into high school. If we pass the exam we become high school students. In order to get into a school we make a lot of effort and study hard.
And we are high school students now!
Here at Nara High School, we have a cafeteria, vending machines, and so on. We can enjoy less strict school life than in junior high school. But we must study even harder for entrance examinations to get into university, if we want to continue our education after high school. Each school has different situations, but, in our school, most of the students hope to go to university.
We will make great efforts to achieve our dreams.
From the left: Tanaka, Itaya, Nakamura, Imaeda