Friday, 12 December 2014
Hangzhou News - Football!
Labels:
2014 Year Group,
Football,
GYS,
Hangzhou News
Monday, 8 December 2014
Music Monday - 'Game of Thrones'
Labels:
2014 Year Group,
GYS,
Monday Music,
Music
Friday, 5 December 2014
The spirit of the season
Friday, 28 November 2014
More glimpses of China 'on the road' (er, Canal)
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Football for ALL!
Friday, 21 November 2014
Hangzhou News - surreal edition
Thursday, 13 November 2014
Memories of the Grand Canal - Project Week 2014
As we are about to start contemplating ideas for next year's Project Week activities (for discussion at our upcoming Parents' Weekend'), this seems a good time to look back on some of the things our pioneering intake got up to during the very first CIS Hangzhou Project Week - from the 24th to the 30th March this year.
Since China's celebrated 'Grand Canal' has its origin point in Hangzhou (branching off from the Qiantang River, just to the south of the Yangtze Delta) and is a central element of the city's identity, we thought it would be appropriate to consider the history and the continuing importance of this mighty thoroughfare. A group of six students and four adults flew to its terminus in the northern capital of Beijing and then returned to Hangzhou tracing the route of the canal - with stops along the way in the canalside cities of Dezhou (the 'capital' of China's solar power industry), Xuzhou (home to a bigger lake than Hangzhou's, and a collection of terracotta warriors smaller than Xi'an's but equally impressive), Wuxi, and Suzhou. We made a point of trying to use as many different modes of transport as possible:高铁, local train, bus, taxi, long-distance coach (on all of which M. Biret and I managed to sleep!) - and even a waterbus (for the very last leg of the journey in Hangzhou, from Wulin Square Wharf back to our local Walmart on nearby Gudun Lu).
Since China's celebrated 'Grand Canal' has its origin point in Hangzhou (branching off from the Qiantang River, just to the south of the Yangtze Delta) and is a central element of the city's identity, we thought it would be appropriate to consider the history and the continuing importance of this mighty thoroughfare. A group of six students and four adults flew to its terminus in the northern capital of Beijing and then returned to Hangzhou tracing the route of the canal - with stops along the way in the canalside cities of Dezhou (the 'capital' of China's solar power industry), Xuzhou (home to a bigger lake than Hangzhou's, and a collection of terracotta warriors smaller than Xi'an's but equally impressive), Wuxi, and Suzhou. We made a point of trying to use as many different modes of transport as possible:高铁, local train, bus, taxi, long-distance coach (on all of which M. Biret and I managed to sleep!) - and even a waterbus (for the very last leg of the journey in Hangzhou, from Wulin Square Wharf back to our local Walmart on nearby Gudun Lu).
Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao
Tuesday, 11 November 2014
Remembrance Day
Friday, 7 November 2014
Tongzhou IDE - 'Coastlines'
Labels:
2014 Year Group,
Coastlines,
Film Class,
IDE,
Tongzhou
Monday, 3 November 2014
Orchestrash!
One of the optional projects for our students to engage in during our excursion to the river island of Tongzhou right before half-term was creating 'Orchestrash', a musical ensemble playing instruments assembled from discarded junk found in the neighbourhood... and then performing for the rest of the school at our farewell bonfire party (a "Bonfire Bonanza of Beats").
Filmed by Mr Murphy
(Apologies for the lousy picture quality: it was pitch dark, and I didn't manage to get a good viewing position! The sound, at least, is quite... authentic.)
Labels:
2014 Year Group,
IDE,
Music,
Tongzhou
Friday, 31 October 2014
Hangzhou News - Presentation to Year 9
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Mr Pratt
Friday, 24 October 2014
More scenes from Tongzhou
Tuesday, 21 October 2014
Culinary Capers!
Labels:
2014 Year Group,
Cooking,
IDE,
Photo Montage,
Tongzhou
Friday, 10 October 2014
Hangzhou News - Geography Field Day
This Tuesday was devoted entirely to Geography, with students spending the day using mapping software to plot the positions of buildings on the GYS host campus, and then creating hand-drawn map/games. Cheeling Wu, Ariana Beaver, and Enrique Chuidian introduce their products.
Monday, 6 October 2014
More glimpses of the GYS Primary Teaching Experience
To follow up on Stephen Chan's brief video report a week or so back, here are some of the photographs I took of our Primary Teaching Experience - where our students worked in teams of two or three to deliver a series of 40-minute English lessons to small groups of young children from Grades 4 to 6 in the Primary division of our host school, Greentown Yuhua.
The music is DJ Dain's mashup of I'm Yours (Jason Mraz), Don't Worry, Be Happy (Bobby McFerrin), and What A Wonderful World (Israel Kamakawiwo’ole) [and there's a little bit of Over The Rainbow in there too!]
Slideshow created by Mr Murphy
Friday, 3 October 2014
Hangzhou News - settling in, one month in
This week's 'Hangzhou News' features a couple of short interviews - with student Tristan Wong and Coach Mentor Thebes Law - on their experiences during their first month living here on the Hangzhou campus.
Monday, 29 September 2014
Keep on plugging away!
Friday, 26 September 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - GYS Primary Teaching Experience
Stephen Chan of the 'Hangzhou News' team here gives us a glimpse of last week's 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience', in which our students, working together in teams of three, attempted to teach a morning of classes to small groups of visiting students from the Primary division of our partner school, Greentown Yuhua School (GYS).
Most of our IDEs are reprising successful events we ran in our pioneering year, but this was a completely new initiative. It was a fairly massive logistical challenge - with nearly 800 students (aged 8 to 10) and around 50 of their teachers coming to our campus during the course of the morning. It was also a demanding - but, we hope, enlightening - activity for our students.
Friday, 19 September 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - Homestay
The third of this year's weekly bulletins - giving a glimpse of one experience of our first homestay of the year, in which pairs of students spent a weekend with the family of a buddy from our partner school, Greentown Yuhua Middle School.
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
Stepping out in style
During our "I am a country" inter-disciplinary experience last week, students each drew a country by lot and were then asked to spend the whole week imagining the viewpoint of that country and its people in a variety of situations and activities. Both subject teachers and coach mentors initiated a number of learning inquiries inspired by this premise.
In Film class, students were challenged to find the most interesting short film clip that was representative of their allotted country. Sherson Ng had initially been disappointed to draw the small and unregarded Republic of Congo... but then his researches turned up this delightful mini-documentary on the 'Sapeurs' of Brazzaville.
Friday, 12 September 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - Interview with Mr Pratt
CIS Hangzhou Director, Richard Pratt, reflects on the beginning of our second year.
Saturday, 6 September 2014
Closing Ceremony - June 2014
Friday, 5 September 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - arrival
A few first impressions - our high-spirited new crop of students' arrival in CIS Hangzhou last week.
Filmed by Adam Guo and Ingrid Tsang; edited by Stephen Chan
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
China Grassroots Football
One of the most popular and successful of our 'Community & Service' projects has been our involvement with China Grassroots Football (CGF), an NGO that provides football coaching to young Chinese children. During Project Week last March, several students helped run a coaching camp (where they were themselves able to train for a Chinese FA coaching certificate). To promote that event, Joe Littler - outstanding Film student and enthusiastic CGF participant - prepared this montage of the experiences of his classmates during the twice-weekly sessions coaching for CGF that they had been taking part in throughout the year.
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
Where we came from...
CIS Hangzhou Director Richard Pratt created this montage of his favourite photographs from 2012 to 2014, celebrating the process of building and establishing our school. This was first shared at the farewell assembly for our opening year's students, before they returned to Hong Kong this June.
The music is If I Were A Bell, performed by Miles Davis.
Photographed and edited by Mr Pratt
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
They loved it!
Towards the end of our first year of operation, we asked our students to sum up what they'd most enjoyed about their time here in Hangzhou.
This year's new batch of students will surely soon be building up their own store of happy memories of the place.
Filmed and edited by Coach Mentor Aydee Tie
Saturday, 14 June 2014
End-of-year concert
Last night, as part of our Arts Festival to welcome parents for our farewell weekend, a group of music students performed a classical concert in the Music Hall.
Here are some of the highlights:
Sophia Chan playing Henryk Wieniawski's Scherzo for Violin...
Kelly Kwok playing Frédéric Chopin's Scherzo in B Minor on piano...
And Yudo Wong playing J.S. Bach's 2nd Flute Sonata...
Sophia and Yudo are, of course, accompanied on the piano by our Director of Music, Tama Karena.
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Arts Festival,
Flute,
Music,
Piano,
Violin
Monday, 9 June 2014
Meeting Cindy Pon
CIS Hangzhou's first ever writer-in-residence, American Chinese YA author Cindy Pon, spent the first week of June on campus with us. Although she had arrived over the weekend and had already attended some classes on Monday morning, her formal introduction to the student body came when everyone assembled in the Library meeting area on Monday afternoon to hear her being interviewed about her life and work by English teacher Paul Murphy, who had arranged her visit.
Filmed by Hayson Chu
Thanks to the CIS Annual Fund for its generous support of this initiative
Friday, 6 June 2014
Three views of our first year in Hangzhou
Back in November, Film students Yudo Wong, Abigail Yee, and Ciara Jacob were practising shooting interviews as part of their study unit on the documentary genre.
Here we have some reflections on the early months of CIS Hangzhou from Abi herself, from English and Film teacher Paul Murphy [Gosh, I was porky at the start of the year! They say the camera adds a few kilos - but the rest is all my own fault!], and from Coach Mentor Liu Jing.
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Hengdian
Semester 2 Film students took a class trip in March to visit the Hengdian World Studios, a major Zhejiang tourist attraction in the town of Dongyang, about 120 miles south of Hangzhou. Hengdian is a vast site, boasting several of the world's largest outdoor movie sets, including a full-size replica of the Forbidden City and a Han Dynasty palace that was built in the mid-90s for the filming of Chen Kaige's The Emperor and The Assassin and was made even more famous when it featured in Zhang Yimou's Hero in 2002.
Filmed and edited by Nick Berry, Cheryl Lee and Jeffrey Lam
Monday, 2 June 2014
A Coach Mentor speaks
One of our Coach Mentors, Wang Lu, was interviewed in Chinese by Nick Hildebrandt, Madeleine Witt, and Noam Braude for one of their Semester 1 assessment projects in Film. He has some interesting things to say about how this new role is evolving. [Subtitles in English]
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Piano concert
At a concert last October, our star pianist Kelly Kwok performed Robert Schumann's Papillons and Alberto Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas for us. She was then joined by her friend Vanessa Wat, who sang Somewhere from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story.
Filmed by Mr Karena
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Music,
Piano
Wednesday, 28 May 2014
First impressions
Here's a short interview with Joe Littler and Kenny Jeong, done on the day of our Opening Ceremony back in September. It was one of a series of chats with students in their dorms filmed by one of our governors, Alex Tancock, for possible use in the film he was compiling to celebrate CIS Hong Kong's 30th Anniversary this year. [You can watch the finished film here. This didn't make it into the final edit, but a lot of Hangzhou footage did.]
Although they had only been here a week or two by this point, they already seem to have formed some powerfully positive impressions of the place. (No teachers bribed them to say this - honestly!)
And gosh - they look young in this! These two guys have grown up a lot this year.
Filmed by Alex Tancock
Saturday, 24 May 2014
All you knead is love
During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of this year's 'Project Week' offerings for CIS Hangzhou students - our intrepid group of musicians (Kelly Kwok, Jessie Gao, Vanessa Wat, and JJ Cheng, accompanied by Director of Music Tama Karena, Julia Hsieh, and Aydee Tie) took a morning off to visit a bakery. Jessie seems to have more of an aptitude for working with dough than Mr K! But perhaps it was more of an exercise in percussion than baking....
Filmed by Aydee Tie
Wednesday, 21 May 2014
Early impressions of Hangzhou
On the last of our three days of 'orientation' at the start of the year, we ventured out into Hangzhou for the first time - to spend a day hiking around Xihu, the famous West Lake (and we were blessed with particularly glorious weather for the expedition).
Ciara Jacob created this nice photo montage of the day out (with a little bit of video too: Gloria Schiavo gives a potted history of the Leifeng Pagoda).
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
Slapstick
For their first 'challenge shoot' in the Film class this year, students were briefed to go out and create a short reel of simple stunts or sight gags. This was really just to let them have a bit of fun while becoming familiar with how to use the cameras; but the clips they produced lent themselves well to having enhanced sound effects added in later - using the dark art of Foley. Jasper Ng, Hayson Chu, and David Zhang produced one of the best efforts on this.
Filmed by David Zhang, edited by Jasper Ng
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Film Class,
Foley
Saturday, 17 May 2014
Busking
During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of our 'Project Week' activities at the end of March - our students took some time out to go busking in a park. Here are JJ Cheng, Vanessa Wat, Kelly Kwok and Jessie Gao (joined by Coach Mentor Aydee Tie) singing the standard Fly Me to the Moon (words and music by Bart Howard).
Filmed by Mr Karena
Thursday, 15 May 2014
Getting noticed
Big thanks to Mandy Ng in the school's PR department down in Hong Kong for arranging to link this site to the CIS Hangzhou website! We now have two links from there, one on the homepage (down near the bottom of the righthand sidebar, just beneath the handsome picture of Jeffrey Lam)....
.... and one slightly more prominent one on the Hangzhou News page (next to Mr Pratt's weekly bulletins)....
Thanks also to Rosh Harjani, the administrator of the school's Moongate portal, who has given us an icon of our own in the 'Spotlight' box at the top right of the homepage (although you have to have your 'widgets' option activated in order to see this view of the site).
Hopefully, this improved interconnectedness between our school's various online information channels will slowly gather more attention for our little video blog here from the wider CIS community and beyond.
Labels:
About the blog
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Hangzhou's Bagua Tian
One of the groups on our Maths-led Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) at the start of April - (Philosopher!) Charlie Salnikow, Jasper Ng, Gloria Schiavo, Jeffrey Chak Long Lam, Abi Yee and Joe Littler - created this film about their experiences at Hangzhou's unusual tourist attraction, the Bagua Tian: a group of fields arranged in the form of Taoism's 八卦, the 'Eight Symbols'.
Filmed and edited by Joe Littler
Sunday, 11 May 2014
The demonstrators
Our last Cotillion of the year last night brought back a lot of happy memories of previous evenings in this more-or-less monthly series of dances, which have been kindly arranged by Mr and Mrs Jooris.
Our regular host Axel Leven and his good friend Fin McCombe always seem to get 'volunteered' to demonstrate the dance steps - perhaps because they are the best sports rather than necessarily the best dancers. Here, they're having a go at the tango...
Filmed by Mr Murphy
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Cotillion,
Tango
Friday, 9 May 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - 9th May 2014
Another weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou - this time giving us a brief behind-the-scenes glimpse of the school Choir gearing up for an end-of-year performance. And the enormous task of taking everyone's photo for the CIS Hangzhou Yearbook continues....
Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao
Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Choir,
Hangzhou News,
Music
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
Chinese Opera
On an improbably warm Sunday afternoon at the start of December, the Chinese Department led the whole school on an excursion to nearby Huanglong Park, where there are regular matinee performances of excerpts from the local Kunqu style of Chinese opera. The genre is enormously popular with senior citizens, but doesn't seem to appeal to a younger audience any more. Nevertheless, our students seemed to find it an interesting experience.
This is just a very brief glimpse of one performance. There may be more to follow in a little while.
Filmed by Mr Murphy
Monday, 5 May 2014
Shanghai Music Week
For the CIS Hangzhou 'Project Week' at the end of March this year, a small group of musicians - Kelly Kwok, JJ Cheng, Jessie Gao, and Vanessa Wat (accompanied by our Director of Music, Tama Karena, and Ms Hsieh and Aydee Tie) - went to Shanghai, to explore the city's diverse music scene... and to meet the challenge of composing a school song.
Filmed and edited by Aydee Tie
Sunday, 4 May 2014
A taiji demonstration
Many of our students have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons throughout the year with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which recently opened a centre here in Hangzhou.
Back in October, Zhang shifu kindly agreed to let us film him giving a complete demonstration of the foundational sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which the whole school endeavoured to learn in an introductory series of taiji lessons at the start of the year.
Filmed by Nick Berry and Hannah Hui
[We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. There's also a sequence Mr Murphy shot a couple of weeks earlier of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine, but in failing light. However, the routine is more readily digestible in this single clip of Zhang shifu which Nick Berry edited together.]
Friday, 2 May 2014
Hangzhou Weekly News - 2nd May 2014
The weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou, prepared for inclusion in our parent school's regular video roundup of 'Friday Morning News'. In this May Week instalment, some of our students discuss their hopes and plans for the last few weeks of our school year here in Hangzhou - including making a Yearbook, a literary magazine.... and lots of new friends.
Filmed and edited by Sierra Chiao and Jasmine Topp
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
5-minute Shakespeare
Our inspiring young English teacher Sharon Lam, herself a CIS alumna, challenged her class to distill Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a series of mini-playlets: working in groups of four, they had to use only extracts of the original text, while condensing the action into just five minutes for each of the five Acts of the play. And she gamely undertook to perform Act One herself - on her own.
Filmed by Mr Murphy
Monday, 28 April 2014
Flash Mob
Sunday, 27 April 2014
'Pleasure in Music' - CIS/GYS joint concert 2014
Saturday, 26 April 2014
Lion Dance
Friday, 25 April 2014
Superstition!
Victor Yin and Lauren Chillington consider whether there's any truth in numerology and other superstitions.
A short film by Nicholas Hildebrandt, created as part of a final group presentation in the Maths-led Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) at the start of April
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Humour,
IDE,
Superstition
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
Kitchen Stomp!
Kelly Kwok, Justin Choo, JJ Cheng, Gabbie DeSombre and Grace Stevens doing a final rehearsal of their 'kitchen stomp' routine for the assessment of their Performing Arts module on Percussion
Filmed by Mr Karena
Labels:
2013 Year Group,
Music
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