A Japanese woman was so confident in her method of teaching the English language to children that she tested it out in Canada.

Kimiko Nakayama, 56, president and CEO of Kinder Kids Inc., now operates 28 preschools in Japan and three more overseas.

She set up the Osaka-based Kinder Kids International Preschool chain 25 years ago to teach children in an English-speaking environment through the company’s original curriculum.

After the company’s rapid expansion in Japan, Nakayama ventured into Canada and the United States, where long lines of applicants formed to enter her preschools in native English-speaking communities.

The preschools teach lowercase letters of the English alphabet before the capitalized ones because an overwhelming majority of English words in books are written in small letters.

For example, 97 percent of the letters in Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” are lowercase, Nakayama said.

In addition, children may not be good at distinguishing between similar-looking lowercase letters, such as “b” and “d,” so they should become familiarized with the small letters early on.

150 BASIC WORDS

Kinder Kids also teaches the more common letters first.

Nakayama learned that “e” appears in more than 10 percent of all words, followed by “a,” “r,” “i,” “o,” “t” and “n” in descending order.

She devised a method for teaching words containing only “a,” “r,” “t” and “n,” such as “art” and “ant,” because she believes these letters are used most often in conversations between children. She then includes “e” and other letters to add more words.

“The readable vocabulary can expand dramatically even before all 26 letters in the alphabet have been learned,” Nakayama said. “The ‘ABC’ order carries no meaning.”

Children at Kinder Kids are also taught to memorize 150 frequently used words.

Nakayama has made 75 picture books, each emphasizing two of the 150 words. The children spend three years reading those 15-page books.

“Learning those 150 words allows you to read 70 to 80 percent of books for young children,” she said.

Knowing nouns, such as “tea,” alone is not enough to allow children to talk, so the lessons focus on verbs.

A conversation only begins with something like, “I want tea,” she said.

VENTURING INTO CANADA

Nakayama’s initial plan when she set up Kinder Kinds Inc. in 2000 was to make her daughter, who was 2, bilingual in Japanese and English.

International preschools at the time were mostly for non-Japanese children. So Nakayama decided to create an English education environment suitable for Japanese.

Her biggest challenge was opening a preschool in the Canadian province of Ontario in 2014.

She chose Canada, where she had studied earlier, to test the effectiveness of her chain’s curriculum in the English-speaking world. She did not change the teaching materials for the Canadian preschool.

The school drew the attention of local news media as an English-speaking kindergarten with Japanese origins.

Its achievements outstripped expectations.

The curriculum, intended for Japanese children, allowed native English-speaking children to widen their vocabulary with an improved rate of knowledge retention, Nakayama said.

She also brought along virtues valued in Japan, such as consideration for others and mutual concessions.

Many alumni of the preschool in Canada were admitted into prestigious local elementary schools, which earned Kinder Kinds the reputation of a distinguished kindergarten.

Nakayama opened another preschool in the U.S. state of Hawaii in 2019 and a second one in Canada in 2022. The two Canadian preschools have a combined quota of 322 pupils, with a waiting list of 900.

VIDEO STREAMING

Around 4,500 children are enrolled in Kinder Kids preschools both in Japan and abroad.

The price for the course is about 150,000 yen ($960) a month, which includes meals and other expenses.

“Only a handful of children can afford to attend a nursery facility that costs millions of yen a year,” Nakayama said. “I think that’s unfair.”

Therefore, she also started an online service to stream teaching materials to elementary schools in Japan, charging several thousand yen per child per month.

Nigawa Gakuin Elementary School in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, has introduced the streamed lessons.

“They allow the children to learn beautiful English even without native English speakers coming to us as instructors,” said Mitsuyo Tanzawa, head of the private school’s English section. “The teaching materials properly cover things that should be taught, such as words that should be learned by heart.”

Asked if a spread of the less expensive streaming service would drive the preschool chain into financial straits, Nakayama said: “Oh no, I have even been spurring those who work on the online teaching materials to ‘wind down’ Kinder Kids.”

26 LETTER CHARACTERS

Some of the original characters that Kinder Kids has developed for each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet are Angry Apple, Busy Bee and Cool Caterpillar.

They are used to teach the correlation between the letters and sounds so learners will be able to read properly.
Children at Kinder Kids sing and dance as they repeatedly pronounce specified letters.

The characters’ names feature adjectives that the children can learn along with the nouns they modify.

Born in Kobe in 1968, Nakayama studied English in Canada after graduating from university. After returning to Japan, she worked at an English conversation school and was put in charge of sales and administration.

She has authored “Kiseki no Eigo Hoikuen” (A miracle English kindergarten), a book available from Gentosha Inc.