Time to show our talents again!!

We're just about to hold our second annual 'talent show' here at CIS Hangzhou this Sunday evening - this year styled Live Lounge.
By happy coincidence, I just unearthed this reminder of last year's show. Some of my Film students, just embarking on their Semester 2 unit of study on 'Reality TV', decided to make this portrait of two of our performers, Kelly Kwok and Vanessa Wat, preparing for the big night. Although this was a non-assessed preliminary exercise, it ended up being one of the most charming and polished films we produced all year. I had thought I'd lost it - but it was merely misfiled.
Vanessa and Kelly sing the classic Fly Me To The Moon (words and music by Bart Howard - which can also be heard in this impromptu performance in a Shanghai park during last year's Project Week) and do a dance routine to Justin Bieber's Beauty and a Beat.


A film by Joe Littler, Kameka Herbst, Hayson Chu and Amy Hopkins

Shadow Puppet Theatre

A midget theatre troupe specialising in 皮影戏 - piyingxi, Chinese shadow play - visited the school on the afternoon of Monday 26th January to demonstrate some of the techniques of this art. Here is a montage of the activities our students enjoyed with them.
The troupe's two extended shadow play performances can be seen here and here, and three additional short scenes here.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Memories of CISSMUN VI

The organisers of the CISSMUN VI Model United Nations conference we attended two weeks ago have kindly shared with us this video portrait of the event which was first screened during the conference closing ceremony on Sunday the 18th of January. Our own Sabrina Chan - one of the reporters helping to compile the conference's daily magazine, The Vigil - appears quite prominently among the vox pop interviews. Eleven CIS Hangzhou students participated in the conference this year.
Once again, many thanks and congratulations are owed to Mr Erik Paulson, the supervising MUN teacher at Concordia International School Shanghai (CISS), Steven Pan the conference's Secretary-General, and all of the organising team for staging a simply superb event.

GYS Drama Project

Our new Drama teacher, Jen Grace, and a few of her students led a series of workshops with students from Greentown Yuhua Middle School during the early part of this semester - preparing to present a special Christmas show,  an original adaptation of Disney's Frozen.

This short documentary about the project was made by a film team of GYS students.

Humans of Hangzhou

Our Coach Mentor team have just devised a particularly engaging Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) to develop some of the key 'Approaches to Learning' that are an integral part of the curriculum in the IB Middle Years Program. Inspired by Brandon Stanton's cult photo blog Humans of New York, we set out to create a 'Humans of Hangzhou' project - where our students would go out and talk with people on the streets of the city, take photographs of them and record the highlights of their conversations. The results of their endeavours over two days were displayed in an art exhibition in our theatre and on our newly launched Humans of Hangzhou website.



Check out the site:  http://www.yuyi.org.cn/cishz/humans-of-hangzhou/

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Journey to Grassroots

A small group of CIS HZ students travels every Wednesday to a primary school in a rundown suburb of Hangzhou where - in collaboration with the NGO China Grassroots Football - they lead a variety of football coaching games with local schoolchildren.

One of my Film students last year, Charlotte Suan, created this montage of the trip for her final assessment project (with just a little help from her teammates Ryan Hsu and Nick Hildebrandt).

We have featured CGF on this blog before, here and here.

A film by Charlotte Suan

Model United Nations

CISSMUN VI, the sixth annual Model United Nations conference to be hosted by Concordia International School Shanghai, was held from the 16th to 18th of January. The whole of our very vigorous and enthusiastic MUN Club - energetically marshalled by Emily Duncan - took part. Emily, Flora Xiao, Lauren Mok, and Jacky Tam represented Thailand on four of the six General Assembly committees, while Natalie Chak, Katherine Ye, Tippy Pei, and Adam Guo represented Yemen on the same committees; Enrique Chuidian was a Yemeni 'expert' on the special Advisory Panel; and Sabrina Chan and Dominic Law were invited to join the press team on the conference's own magazine, the Vigil.
CIS Hong Kong also sent a delegation of nine members, seven of whom had been with us in CIS Hangzhou last year: Kenny Jeong, John Yap, Axel Leven, Victor Yin, Hannah Hui, Gloria Schiavo, and Jemima Barr. This was the first time members of the current and previous Hangzhou cohorts had had occasion to meet on official business - a moment of such historic import that Ms Lam and Ms Lee travelled nearly 100 miles on public transport to join us all for dinner on Saturday evening!!!


The students and staff at Concordia deserve unstinting applause for a superbly organised event - much the best of its kind that I have ever been to. I very much hope that both CIS Hangzhou and CIS Hong Kong will make this a fixture in their MUN calendars from now on.


Slideshow created by Mr Murphy

The music is - of course! - Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears. [Sorry - I couldn't help myself!]

One year ago....

Round about this time last year we staged a Talent Show. Not the most polished act, but one of the most memorable (a huge amount of film was shot of the event by various staff and students, but it all seems to have got lost!) was punk duo Forced Breakfast, with their almost eponymous first composition Breakfast! - a raucous protest against compulsory breakfast attendance. [This year's crop of students seem to be much more accepting of this imposition...]

Breakfast! is written and performed by Fin McCombe (guitar, vocals) and Axel Leven (drums).

My thanks to Forced Breakfast's 'manager' Becca Guo for passing on this rare video footage of one of their few public performances.

More memories of Tongzhou

In the bleak midwinter, our idyllic three-day retreat on nearby Tongzhou island back in the middle of October seems a very long way away indeed - but it's warming to look back and remind ourselves one more time. Here, to complete a trilogy of films on the three main learning activities different groups of students undertook while on the trip, is Film student Shanyu Hou's mini-documentary on the 'Culinary Capers' cooking project. [Here are links to the other two, the 'Orchestrash' music project and the 'Coastlines' PR project.]

A film by Shanyu Hou

Hangzhou News - Football!

In this week's edition of the 'Hangzhou News' Vrithik Metha and Yew San Cheah reflect on a gruelling football match last week against our GYS hosts.

Music Monday - 'Game of Thrones'

If there are not too many other pressing items of business, we usually like to use our Monday morning assembly for a musical performance. This morning, Franco Ngai introduced the nine musicians who had performed with the GYS Orchestra at the annual CIS/GYS concert in Hong Kong last week.
Joined by 'special guest' Kevin Ho on the drum, this group were then conducted by Director of Music Tama Karena in a rendition of the theme from Game of Thrones, by Ramin Djawadi.
The musicians from the orchestra trip were - from left to right - Mia Kriegel, Vivian Gu, Victoria Ngai, Ms Lam, Will Baxter-Bray, Adrian Lee, Chee Ling Wu, and Adam Guo.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

The spirit of the season

The Oakwood Residence in central Hangzhou always invites a Christmas Carol Choir from our school to perform at its annual Christmas Tree Lighting Party in early December. This is the final warm-up/rehearsal in the hotel's lobby last night.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

More glimpses of China 'on the road' (er, Canal)

As a follow-up to Jasmine and Sierra's video posted a couple of weeks ago, here is a slideshow of photographs I took during the Project Week expedition I led at the beginning of April this year - tracing the entire route of China's historic Grand Canal from north to south, with stop-offs in Beijing, Dezhou, Xuzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou, and of course Hangzhou.
Participating in this wonderful journey were students Lauren Chillington, Ciara Jacob, Felicia Huang, Cheryl Lee, Sierra Chiao and Jasmine Topp, and staff members Mark Tang, Pierre Biret and Lorna Scott. Felicia's father, Walter, also appears here - treating us to a rather splendid roast duck dinner in Beijing.

Slideshow created by Mr Murphy

Football for ALL!

Here is another set of photographs from our 'Tongzhou IDE' just before half-term (more photos of that activity here, and videos here and here). These were taken by school director Richard Pratt during the first afternoon, when - in collaboration with the NGO China Grassroots Football (CGF) - our students led a mass football training session for around 150 children from local primary schools.

Slideshow created by Mr Pratt
The music is Ella Fitzgerald singing It's Wonderful.

Hangzhou News - surreal edition

A couple of weeks ago, the municipal government invited our students to attend the final day of the annual Hangzhou International Expo. The main 'entertainment' for the day was rather more lavish than usual: a mass dancing spectacle involving nearly 30,000 Hangzhou citizens - part of a nationwide assault on the Guinness record for the biggest line dance. (You can see more of that magnificent folly here. I haven't been able to find out yet if the attempt has been acknowledged as a new record.)

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).

Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao

Remembrance Day

Ms Lam organised a special assembly for Remembrance Day this morning. In addition to recalling the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers in the Great War, she called attention to the contribution of the workers in the Chinese Labour Corps, who, although non-combatants, shared many of the hazards of the forward lines on the Western Front (their story has been largely forgotten, even in China and certainly in the West; but a campaign has recently been launched by British-born Chinese in the UK to try to ensure that these men too receive their due share of honour in these ceremonies of remembrance).
Will Baxter-Bray played the trumpet, and excerpts of WWI poetry were read by Vivian Gu, Jasmine Savage, and Celeste Yau.

Tongzhou IDE - 'Coastlines'

This short promotional film showcasing the Coastlines leisure company (our partner organisation on Tongzhou island, which offers kayaking and other water sports there) was shot by several of our Film students and edited together by Tristan Wong as part of a multi-media presentation on improving the company's branding and communication - one of our IDE projects (along with 'Orchestrash' and 'Culinary Capers') on our trip there just before half-term.

This is a particularly impressive piece of work, given that it was thrown together under extreme time pressure - the editing completed in barely an hour, and much of the filming (notably the kayaking clip) only being done at the very last minute. Tristan has promised to produce a more polished 'extended cut' for us shortly.

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.)

Hangzhou News - Presentation to Year 9

CIS Hangzhou Director Richard Pratt visited the parent school in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago to give a presentation to the current Year 9s, our prospective third year intake. He was ably supported by a selection of Year 11 students: Axel Leven, Gloria Schiavo, Jasmine Topp, Catherine Wang, and Justin Choo - graduates of our pioneering Hangzhou cohort from last year.

More scenes from Tongzhou

As a follow-up to Ms Lee's portrait of the 'Culinary Capers' cooking activity from last week's Tongzhou IDE, here is a slideshow of some of the photos I took during an idyllic two days away from campus. As well as exploring the charming little river island of Tongzhou and performing with a band of local musicians there, we spent our Wednesday afternoon at the Chinese Football Academy in nearby Tonglu city, staging a mass coaching session for local primary schoolchildren with our partner NGO, China Grassroots Football.

Slideshow created by Mr Murphy

Culinary Capers!

During last week's IDE excursion to the river island of Tongzhou, just south of Hangzhou, one group of students opted to spend some time working with their homestay hosts in the kitchen to learn how to prepare some local dishes.

Slideshow created by Ms Lee

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.

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

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.