Ryota's Daybook: Language Arts, Basic English and Everything

"Days of rain seem to be over."
That's what I said in late July.

But I was wrong.
After the night of fireworks,
we had days of rain again.
The rain cloud was
over the north part of
Honshu Island for a long time.

We hadn't seen the clear sky and
the bright sun till today.

Days of rain seem to be over.
Boys and girls don't go to school now.

We've had great fireworks tonight,
over the Abukuma River.
Beautiful man-made stars
came up in the sky with loud noise
and went away.
Boys, girls, men and women
had a good time looking up.

Sky
The sky is as far as the moon, the stars, the sun.


The sky is worth looking at.

 Emily Dickinson, 1830-86,
is an American woman who made
more than 1,700 poems.
(Poems are verses made as
serious work of art.)

Most of her poems are
very short and beautiful.
Some are very hard
for the readers to get
the ideas put into them by
Dickinson.

Some are simple and
some are shocking.

How about her poem about word?
It goes like this:

Decade, Decalogue, decathlon, decimal and December.
They all have something to do with the number ten.

Today is 12.21, or the twenty-first of December.
It is winter's solstice this year,
when the sun goes to the
farthest place in the sky.

I have made an attempt to
put the 168 pictures into Basic English.
It goes like this:

The Snowman in Basic English
Based of the picture book by Raymond Briggs

Part One

"Nonet" is an English word for the verse made of nine lines,
or a group of nine persons.

"Neuf" is a French word for numer nine.

Language is a town
made of words.

Octagon,
octave,
octet,
October,
octogenarian,
octopus. . . .

They all have
something to do with
the numer eight.