Michael's infatuation with Shogaku Ichinensei

Michael got his reward. He finished his first ABC workbook this weekend, passed his writing test--being able to write his whole English name basically within the lines, looking at his ABD chart still allowed, cleared his requirement to finish reading a number of short phonics reader books.

His reward?: Being able to buy any book he wants under 1000yen at a local bookstore.

His choice? A no-brainer for him. He is in love with a Japanese magazine for 6 year old kids called 小学一年生 ( shogaku ichinensei, literally "First Graders").

But after seeing 2 or 3 purchases of these magazines, I'm thinking that I may have to change my policy on what he gets as his reward.

It is actually much more than a book, all for 650yen. Here's a peak inside. You can see it is designed to drive six year old Japanese kids crazy - an electronic toy of the month (Doraemon voice recorder), lots of photos and comics using popular TV characters like Pokemon, Doraemon, and Kamen Rider, lots of paper crafts (we spent over an hour constructing the extendable robot hand made from paper and plastic rivets), board games, and just a few token pages of school like activities with math and kanji writing (which Mikey ignores, I think) hidden deeply in black/white pages in the middle. There is a DVD of course, which seemed to consist mostly of Doraemon movie re-runs and screen shots of some kind of video game with wild animals fighting and killing each other (Hmm...).

Good parts: I like the crafts a lot and the digital toys are often somewhat educational. Last month was an electronic key board that got Mikey playing songs with Do Re Mi for the first time in his life. I also think the comic strips are also OK since he does a lot of Japanese reading with those. The math and Japanese worksheets are good, of course, if the kids ever would do them.

The crap: The pictures of toys and games, just a bunch of advertisements to make the kids want more, bother me. The DVD was aweful--a total waste of time and frustrating for me because Michael insisted on watching it.

So, what are we going to do about this? I might just ban the DVD for now since he is so into these magazines, and he works hard on his English homework to get to buy them.

Ideally, he would choose some kind of English magazine or book...need to get him hooked on something. But with living in Japan, his exposure to "cool" things comes from Japanese TV and his Japanese kindergarten classmates. He only wants to rent DVDs with Pokemon, and he only wants to buy these magazines.

Any suggestions for a better incentive? Ice cream?