Welcome to October and harvest time! We have lots of homegrown organic pumpkins available now. Every pumpkin purchase is a direct donation to JOEE and the work that we do with children growing up in orphanages in Japan. If you would like to buy a pumpkin, click on the “Pumpkin Order Form” link below:
On the Google Form listed above, you can reserve a pumpkin and name your pick-up date and location. Pumpkins can also be mailed to you, but the cost of postage will be extra. If you would like to simply donate via credit card to JOEE, please use the button labeled “DONATE” at the left. If you would like to make a Japan Postal transfer, the directions are listed below:
You can donate directly to the JOEE Japan Postal Account: Name: ジョーイー (JOEE) JP Branch Kanji: 〇一八 JP Branch: #018 JP Account: #10100-89960791 Account Type: Ordinary (Fustuu)
Why do we do what we do? For the international JOEE volunteers, our best reward is seeing the happy faces of the children as they play, dance and sing while learning English. Being able to speak English and to connect with people from many different cultures are important skills that will help them in the future and they grow up and seek out jobs in Japanese society.
It has been almost six years since JOEE began teaching English lessons in orphanages in Japan. Our volunteer teachers have collected many meaningful and heart-warming memories connecting with eager children and watching them learn and grow. Volunteering is its own reward, of course, but recently JOEE was presented with a recognition award at an event in downtown Tokyo called, “Mochi-Fes.”
“Mochi-Fes” is an annual event sponsored by the Japan Child Foundation. This year, we were invited to participate and to set up a booth to distribute pamphlets and inform the public about our work. A group of energetic JOEE volunteers met up at the Shibuya Line Building on February 6th, ready to spread “JOEE to the world.”
We gave out light blue bracelets printed with the JOEE.jp website and our kangaroo logo (joey means baby kangaroo), which was designed by author-illustrator, Satoshi Kitamura. Over 300 people of all ages stopped by our booth. Many of them met Mehhhgumi the Sheep and stayed to hear about the work that we do with kids growing up in protective care homes.
Later, during a concert and program highlighting the ten different organizations that make a positive difference in the lives of children in orphanages, JOEE, along with other NPOs, was called to the stage to accept a framed award along with a golden soccer ball signed by a famous soccer player, Nahomi Kawasumi.
The best thing about this event was that many people who had never known that there were so many orphanages in Japan, now knew of their existence. Many who did not know about the thousands of children in protective care homes, now knew that these children are there and in need of help and support. Knowing that a problem exists is the first step in finding a solution.
JOEE volunteers give of their time and share their hearts with children who have ended up in orphanages, not through any fault of their own. They are removed from hurtful and neglectful circumstances and placed in a care home where they receive food and clothing and nurturing care until they are 18 years old… and then they are on their own. The kind-hearted souls who help out with JOEE lessons know that the greatest reward is having the privilege to be with these children who deserve a bright future. The best reward is being able to share love.
Joyful Opportunity English Education began five years ago in 2019 with the vision of teaching English to young children growing up in orphanages. Our target participant age group was two to eight years of age. Young children are already in an intensive language-learning stage of their lives, so acquiring a new language at an early age is a natural activity for them. Recently, however, older students have been requesting tutoring.
JOEE is bringing its free English classes to children in seven different orphanages in Japan with the hope that this opportunity will bolster their confidence in language learning and strengthen their ability to connect with responsible adults from a variety of cultures. Eventually, these qualities will help the youth from orphanages find fulfilling and sustainable work when they launch out on their own at age eighteen.
Although our main focus continues to be early years education, recently JOEE has been receiving more requests from older youth who reside in care facilities. Students from sixteen to eighteen years of age begin to think seriously about their future. They begin to plan for their lives outside of the care institution that has sheltered them. Many of these youth understand that being able to speak English greatly increases their opportunities for employment in Japan and around the world.
Photo taken by six-year old JOEE student in a Tokyo orphanage.
この写真は、東京の児童養護施設に通う6歳のJOEE生が撮影したものだ。
JOEE volunteers have begun teaching more one-on-one English tutoring classes with older teens who are looking ahead to their job prospects. Some of our students have gone on to college, even majoring in English. One student intends to become an English teacher in Japan, so he is working very hard and concentrating on accurate English-language pronunciation. We believe that all of these children deserve a bright and exciting future. We hope that you will help to support JOEE in any way that you can.
Joyful Opportunity English Education continues to add teacher-volunteers to its ranks. We are very fortunate in having so many kind helpers who have a heart for ministering to the children in the protective care system in Japan. Currently, JOEE is operating with about 30 active volunteers. They come from all over the globe: Australia, Brazil, India, Israel, Norway, USA, Latvia, New Zealand, Serbia, and, of course, Japan.
These teachers craft their own unique and engaging lessons using the JOEE curriculum and template as a springboard. Their lessons involve singing, dancing, crafting, speaking and various language games. The variety of lessons taught is impressive.
During the month of June, JOEE taught 25 English-language lessons in various orphanages as well as online private lessons for at-risk children and youth. During July we will continue to teach classes until the summer break begins in many of the orphanages. Then the creative, active JOEE classes will resume once again at the end of August and in early September.
We are still looking for more orphanages that would like to welcome the free JOEE program into their facilities. Currently, JOEE gives classes in the following six care homes: St. Francisco Children’s Home, Kawasaki Aijien, Chofu Gakuen, Harukaen in Chiba, Yurikagoen in Odawara, and Wakamatsu Ryo in Nagoya. We have volunteers who are willing and able to offer free online one-on-one English language lessons to children who are currently in a care home or who have recently exited from a care home and are starting out their life on their own.
If you know of a children’s home that might welcome JOEE lessons, or if you would like to volunteer, please send us an email. Donations are always welcome as well. You can use the secure link to donate via Stripe. The button is located at the left. Thank you to many for your kind and generous support of JOEE.
Weaving compelling and enriching activities into JOEE lessons is one of the things that our volunteer teachers do best. In order to add interest and joy to their language classes, JOEE teachers get creative. They add lots of helpful visuals, plus yoga, art, acting, dancing and even incorporating building materials and potato chips into their weekly lessons.
Here are some examples of joyful JOEE-ful learning at the orphanages where we serve:
以下は、私たちが奉仕している児童養護施設での「JOEEフルな」楽しい学習の例です:
JOEE teacher, Cailee demonstrates the “Potato Chip Practice” — making the English “TH” sound, while tasting a chip is a delicious way to teach correct pronunciation. Japanese contains no “TH” sound, so this dental fricative digraph is a challenging sound for those with Japanese as their first language. “Say ‘thank-you’ three times; then eat the chip!” A yummy language-learning exercise!
This December, JOEE delivered gifts to St. Francisco Children’s Home and organized a party with fun treats and wonderful music. Thank you to members of Tokyo Union Church (a regular JOEE donor) for helping with the Christmas party! Every child in the care home was given a gift, thanks to the generous donations of families from Christian Academy in Japan who have provided gifts for the past three years and who are also great supporters of Joyful Opportunity English Education.
For the lessons leading up to Christmas, at Harukaen in Chiba, another JOEE volunteer, Kristine, brought a beautiful Advent calendar to count down the days until Dec. 25th. This helped the children learn numbers and Christmas vocabulary in a beautiful, crafty and creative way.
And at the Harukaen Children’s Home, another creative JOEE teacher, Mounir, had the bright idea of having the children construct their own models of homes that they would one day like to live in. They used cardboard, wood scraps, glue and other found materials to make houses while they learned English vocabulary words like, “wall, roof, floor, door, table, chair, bed, window.” Here are some samples of their cool constructions:
Another Harukaen volunteer-teacher, Ray, who also teaches full-time at an international school, makes time to help at-risk children with well-planned English lessons that use bright visual helps to teach.
Many of our JOEE teachers use puppets to help teach English — lots of different animals with silly voices make learning English fun. The children also enjoy using puppets to practice their English vocabulary. Here are some teachers that help out at WakamatsuRyo in Nagoya with a few puppet friends:
A new year has begun as 2024 brings us into the “Year of the Dragon.” JOEE hopes to continue helping children to learn English, to meet friendly teachers from around the world, and to bring joy through weekly JOEE lessons. Thank you to many of you who donate to JOEE to help us continue our work. Blessings on your year!
JOEE Keeps Hopping and Hoping — Sept. 2023 — JOEE Expands to Odawara!
JOEEの希望あふれる活動展開 – 2023年9月 – JOEEが小田原に進出!
The JOEE project launched in April of 2019 in Japan. Our JOEE Corporate Number is 4011205002314. We have been hopping along and providing fun and lively, puppet-enhanced English lessons to children in orphanages in Japan ever since! Your continuing support makes those lessons possible.
Our volunteer teachers reach children in six facilities across Japan. Now, in Odawara, JOEE teaches at Yurikagoen where master art teacher, Ula, has been creating memorable lessons for the children. All children deserve a hopeful and bright future. JOEE works to bring education and joy to children in Japan.
We keep hopping and hoping to do more. As we grow and expand into new orphanages, our organization grows as well. We have welcomed another part-time administrator into JOEE and we are continuing to train new teachers and reach out to more orphanages. After a brief summer break, JOEE lessons are starting up once more and we hope to soon fill in some needed volunteer teacher spots at a couple of care facilities in Tokyo — Chofu Gakuen and St. Francisco Children’s Home.
“I noticed the children’s expressions. There was a desire to learn, and a desire to connect with people.”
「子どもたちの表情に気づきました。学びたい気持ちと、人とつながりたい気持ちが感じられました。」
JOEE’s administrators have worked hard to establish a new internationally-recognized bank account where larger donations can be accepted. For corporations who would like to donate directly, they can do so through our MUFG bank account. So far, we have two regular donors who contribute monthly through this website. We are very grateful to these generous souls. Hopefully, we will soon have some government and corporate sponsors to give us a boost! The new JOEE bank account information is listed below:
Here is what we hope for the future: To connect with more chiildren’s homes — To train new volunteer teachers from around the world — To find government and corporate funding and sponsorship — To be able to reimburse the travel expenses of our volunteer teachers and buy more teaching supplies.
ChofuGakuen volunteer teacher, Sheila W., who has children enrolled in an international school in Tokyo and has worked as a teacher for many years, kindly donated many hours planning and teaching JOEE lessons to children ages two to six. She had some creative and captivating ideas for making English language classes engaging and fun. Take a look at some of her wonderful lesson plans:
“I was given a bee puppet to use for my first class at ChofuGakuen so I decided to go all in with a bee theme in my first week. I dressed in black and yellow and wore an antennae headband. I crafted a beehive out of a cardboard box, bubblewrap and pipecleaners. Then, I made bee squishies out of small yellow balloons filled with flour. They felt like stress balls and were easy to throw and catch. I read The Honeybee by Kristen Hall and then we paired up and made our squishy bees fly and dance. We were busy, buzzing bees!”
“The following week, we read the book A Parade of Elephants by Kevin Henkes. This book just begs for the students to become elephants and parade around the room to practice the prepositions of up, down, in, out, over, under. To get into character, each child decorated a cardstock finger puppet to wear as we marched through obstacles we placed around the room. When the elephants in the book trumpet at the stars, we placed a small star sticker on the trunks (finger) of our little elephants and we made a chorus of our own trumpeting sounds.”
“翌週は、ケビン・ヘンクスの「A Parade of Elephants」という本を読みました。この本は、生徒たちが象になって部屋の中を練り歩き、前置詞のup, down, in, out, over, underを練習するのにぴったりな本なのです。象に成りすますために、生徒たちは一人一人、カード用紙で指人形を作り、それを着けて、部屋中に置かれた障害物をくぐり抜けました。本の中のゾウが星に向かって鼻をトランペットのように鳴らすとき、小さな星のシールを小さなゾウの体幹(指)に貼り、自分たちのトランペットの音で合唱しました。”
Ribbon Numbers
“The third week, we started off with a rubber duck scavenger hunt where students had to seek out an assigned number that was found on the bottom of each duck. Then, we read One Leaf Rides the Wind by Celeste Davidson Mannis. In this book, the character counts different objects in her Japanese garden. With each page, each child was tasked with ‘drawing’ the number using a piece of ribbon. It was a fun and rewarding challenge!” — Sheila W.
“3週目は、まずゴム製のアヒルの借り物競争で、それぞれのアヒルの底にある番号を探し出すことから始めました。そして、Celeste Davidson Mannisの「One Leaf Rides the Wind」を読みました。この絵本では、主人公が日本庭園にあるさまざまなものを数えるのですが、子どもたちは各ページにリボンを使って数字を「描く」ことに挑戦しました。楽しくて、やりがいのあるチャレンジでした!」。” シーラ・W
Our volunteer JOEE teachers follow the basic structure of a pre-made curriculum that begins by teaching the first 100 words that an English-language-learner (ELL) might acquire within the first year of verbal fluency. The teachers can then change and enhance the lessons with their own resources. We are blessed with very creative teachers and are so thankful to have them on our team!
Our volunteer teachers at JOEE come from many different countries – Australia, USA, India, Latvia, Jamaica, Norway, along with bi-lingual volunteers from Japan. They serve little kids that have been abused by their parents and are sheltering in care homes.
Games with MimiJOEE at Yurikagoen in OdawaraErjo reads at Harukaen in Chiba
We go to the homes with lively, music and puppet-enhanced English lessons that bring these children Joy, along with an educational boost in a world that is already stacked against them. Statistically, children who have grown up in care homes have higher rates of joblessness and suicide that youth with the advantage of supportive homes. JOEE is working to change that by giving these very important children a brighter future.
Priyanka with a Quilt GameHands-on Puppets!Lessons in Chofu, Ota and Mitaka
One of the most important lessons that these kids learn during JOEE lessons is that kind, trusted adults can come from a wide variety of nationalities and ethnic groups. Learning to embrace folks from other countries is a lesson best learned when young and then your world view is being formed. This world-embracing mindset can be a big advantage for them when they launch out into our multi-cultural world in search of jobs and healthy connections.
JOEE is always looking for generous donors — those who can contribute financially to support our programs and those who can give of their time and teaching skills. Our volunteers are vetted and must agree to a thorough background check in order to enter the care homes as a JOEE teacher. If you are interested in helping out, please contact the Founding Director at the following email address: ruth(at)joee.jp
On October 15, Mehhgumi the Sheep made her singing debut in Tokyo at a fundraiser for a nonprofit benefitting kids in care homes. Mehhgumi, (who is also known as “Baaa-bara”), with a bit of help from me, sang the Sesame Street classic, created by Jeff Moss, “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon.” Have a listen:
10月15日、羊のめ~ぐみは、養護施設の子供たちを応援する非営利団体の東京での募金イベントで歌手としてデビューしました。め~ぐみ(「バ~バラ」とも呼ばれる)は、私の助けを借りて、ジェフ・モスが作成したセサミストリートの名曲「I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon」を歌いました。聞いてください:
I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon
Jones, that old hound dog, had begged with his big, old puppy eyes, to be taken along to the fundraising event. He was thrilled when Elvis showed up and belted out the “Hound Dog” song. Jones danced and howled along with the music, gracing us all with doggy breath and delirious drool.
We had a marvelous time, crooning tunes and dancing like loons. I did my best to help by singing and playing the harmonica along with the John Denver classic, “Take Me Home Country Roads.” Towards the end of the evening, something very mysterious and magical happened.
For several weeks, I had been planning trips to Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka on behalf of JOEE. I would be preaching at a couple of churches and visiting orphanages with my puppets. One event that I was looking forward to attending was a birthday party for a little girl in Kobe. The theme of the party was rabbits. Did I have a large rabbit puppet that I could bring to the party to perform with? No, I did not. I had lions, cats, sheep, frogs, even an elephant. But no large rabbits. So, I was thinking hard about rabbits that night. I was wishing for a rabbit puppet. Guess what happened?
While taking a break from singing up on stage, a woman approached me and, out of the blue, asked me, “Would you like to have a rabbit puppet?” My jaw dropped in surprise. “Yes! I would love to have a rabbit puppet!” I wondered how in the world did this woman, (whom I had never met before), know that I needed a rabbit puppet. “Wait here — I’ll be back soon.” She returned with a beautiful puppet that had sat in her house, unused, for forty years. “I would be happy if you could use this puppet with JOEE.”
I accepted the new JOEE puppet with joy and brought it back with me to my home in Nagano. I call it my “Thought Rabbit.” And because “thought” is “kanga-e” in Japanese and because JOEE or “joey” means baby kangaroo, maybe I can call it “Kangae-roo.” It was a thought in my head and then it magically appeared and jumped into my arms.
We hope that good and magical things continue to happen through JOEE and that our supporters will share in our joy at helping others. Please help us reach our goal of raising $50,000 within the next couple of years by donating at the link below. This is our new Global Giving fundraiser, “JOEE to Japan!” Can you help us reach our giving goal? Here’s the link or you can click on the “Global Giving link below:
私たちは、JOEEを通じて魔法のような良いことが起こり続け、サポーターの皆様が人を助ける喜びを私たちと分かち合ってくださることを願っています。以下のリンクで寄付して、今後2年以内に50,000ドル集めるという目標を達成するのを手伝ってください。これは私たちの新しいGlobalGiving募金「JOEE to Japan!」です。募金目標を達成するのを手伝ってくれませんか?このリンクか、以下の「GlobalGiving」リンクをクリックしてください。
For those of you who would like to listen in on a JOEE lesson for children in Ukraine, here’s your chance. This month, in January, 2023, please join us at 8pm, Japan Standard Time, on Monday, Jan. 16, 23 and 30 for a fun, puppet-assisted online get-together. For adults joining, please keep your video and audio muted to let more children participate. This link will go live at 8pm on those three Mondays, Japan time, which is 1pm in Ukraine. You will need the passcode to enter the session:
Our first teachers were Annie and Lilian, followed by our most recent teacher, Tomoko who has now taught here since April of 2022. She has been assisted by our administrator, Hiroko, along with regular helpers, Jorge and Yushi and a special guest teacher, Chiyuki.
Tomoko has carefully-planned lessons every week that build on the previous week’s material. Her lessons incorporate games, singing, action, books and puppets to keep the children engaged and excited. The children at Chofu Gakuen love JOEE time!
Our JOEE teachers usually teach once a week at a children’s home on a regular schedule. When a regular teacher is unable to attend, other JOEE teachers may step in to substitute for that lesson. Our substitute teachers love meeting new children and enjoying the energy and enthusiasm that they bring to class time.
JOEE is active in several children’s homes in Tokyo including Chiba, one in Nagoya and one in Kobe. We are actively looking for more homes that would welcome free English lessons and we continue to train teacher volunteers. Contact us if you would like to help: ruth@joee.jp.