How My Parents Learned to Eat (Japan)

Third graders listened to How My Parents Learned to Eat by Ina R. Friedman and illustrated by Allen Say.  The narrator is a young girl telling the story of how her parents met.  Her mother was living in Japan, and her father was an American soldier stationed in Japan.  They would go for walks and talk, but they were afraid to eat out with each other because he did not know how to use chopsticks and she had never used utensils such as a fork and knife.  So the girl's dad secretly went to a Japanese restaurant alone and had the waiter teach him how to use chopsticks, while the girl's mother had her uncle teacher her how to use utensils like the Westerners did.

We discussed tofu and chopsticks and kimonos, each of which appeared in the story. And we pointed out the different customs people from each country used when greeting each other (shaking hands vs. bowing).  We learned a lot about Japan!