One of us was leaving today, so we decided to make most of our final lessons with the kids with some pictures and photo-taking. Usually we don’t bring cameras into the classroom to distract them, because the kids LOVE the camera. For my second grade class, I allowed them to draw whatever they liked, and […]
I’ve not mentioned this before, but the teachers at the school came up with this 5.30pm slot (which most of us came to dread later on) where we the foreign teachers have to devise activities to mingle and play with the children after they have finished their classes and were waiting for their parents to […]
For the past few days, we were preparing a dance for the Children’s Day event in our school. Catherine came up with a funny dance which she learned from god knows where. After much tweaking, laughing and failed attempts, we were ready for our performance in front of the whole school. We have a recording […]
Late in the morning (for Beijing, late morning is around 6-7am since everyone gets up around 5am) I received a few phone calls while I was still asleep from an unknown number. When I finally got up, returned the calls and it appeared to be from the local postman. He told me he had a […]
It was not easy trying to come up with activities for those younger children we had to teach, so I scrapped through my very vague memories of art activities we did back in primary school (as I’m not a very creative person) and remembered that we had a fun one where we made paper houses […]
After returning to our school from the week-long training, we had to get down to business, our real purpose for being here, which was to teach the kids about HIV/AIDS. However, the teachers also had other things in mind, as they didn’t wanted to waste the opportunity to have some ‘foreigners’ in their school, they […]
It was finally our last day of training, and it was more laid-back compared to our previous days. For one, today’s training was more focused on us, and also teaching us new ways to get the kids to interact with each other. The facilitator, who was from Inner Mongolia, had a ball of yarn which […]
When we got up today, we were told that Fiona had contacted one of our member the night before, asking for us to pack our things and move to an area near the Renmin University, as we would need to attend a training for the next few days. After some discussion among us, we decided […]
We were awoken by the screams and shouts of the children around 4-5am, and it was a rather futile attempt trying to shut them out while catching up on sleep, so eventually we gave up and got up for breakfast around 9am. The canteen was just right across our room, so we joined the queue […]
In 2010, from May to June, I spent the whole two months in Beijing, China, volunteering under a project spearheaded by AIESEC. A little background on the project which I was working under, aptly named ‘Red Wings Project’, the main aim was to reach out to underpriviledged children to educate them about HIV/AIDS. Originally, I […]
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