Keep on plugging away!

Mr Karena shared with us at morning assembly today this entertaining little song by British rock band Transition, as an encouragement to us all to persist in our efforts to master Chinese. (Apparently, the boys are regular visitors to Taiwan rather than the mainland, so their 普通话 probably sounds a little bit sibilant.)

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.

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.

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.

Hangzhou Weekly News - Interview with Mr Pratt

CIS Hangzhou Director, Richard Pratt, reflects on the beginning of our second year.

Closing Ceremony - June 2014

We rounded off our momentous first year here in Hangzhou with a formal closing ceremony at the end of our final parents' weekend on Sunday 15th June.
Kenny Jeong and Catherine Wang were our very capable MCs. Dan Kinzer and Jianping Pratt spoke on behalf of CIS Hangzhou teaching staff, Andi Lee, Charlie Salnikow, Madeleine Witt, and John Yap on behalf of the students, Natalie Lau and Yohei Tse on behalf of the Coach Mentors, and Guy Chambers on behalf of the parents.
Distinguished guests were Xu Yichao, Deputy General Secretary of the Hangzhou Communist Party, Xiao Feng of the Hangzhou Education Bureau, Chen Feng and Zheng Ping of the Hangzhou Entry & Exit Administration, Jin Heng of the Hangzhou Foreign Affairs Office, Chen Haike, Yu Zhengping, and Wang Yinchu of the Greentown Education Group, Chen Jianguo, Principal of Greentown Yuhua High School, Sun Zhuoren, Deputy Principal of Greentown Yuhua Middle School, and Chen Xiaojen, Deputy Principal of Greentown Yuhua Primary School.
The event closed with a musical performance by our whole-school choir.

[My apologies for the poor sound: the shotgun microphone I was trying to use had a faulty jack-plug, and the onboard microphone in the camera wasn't really adequate at this distance.]

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

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. 

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