Angel’s teaching experience in China

Target
I visited a primary school in Luoding Shi which is in Guangdong for 1 week in 2010, teaching a class of 30 Grade 6 students English. My team mates and I designed a series of teaching plan which includes games, music and competitions. We started off every English lesson with a new simple English song. I would ask all of them to stand up and form a circle with hands holding together to create a warm and friendly atmosphere. Sometimes we would also add actions to the songs to further strengthen their memory.

Impressive Moments
Many of the students turned out to be pretty good at English. When designing the teaching plan, our team planned to give them a revision on the first lesson and for the following lessons we would teach them simple English vocabularies. However we found out at the revision class that most of them were good enough to speak simple English words. Therefore we quickly made changes in the teaching plan to fit the scenario at that time. The plan turned out to be very successful as all the students enjoyed having English lessons with us. Most importantly, they really learnt some useful English from all these activities.

Benefits of Students
I think the students understood that learning can be fun at the end of our program. Under the rural area education system, students have no choice but to sit in the classroom passively. Due to their living environment, most of them are not able to get access to the internet to listen to English songs and cannot afford buying CDs. Hence it is a whole new experience for them to have a chance to study English in this playful way so I think the program had definitely raised their interest in English. This trip also stimulated them to think of things that can make learning more interesting regardless of their living condition. For example, doing role play with classmates in English is one of the fun ways to enjoy themselves after class without spending money.

Benefits of Myself
I have learnt to appreciate everyone’s talent after seeing all the students are so gifted. Despite of their poor living condition, I can still see many of them strike hard and hope one day they could get out of the rural areas and follow their dreams. I believe that everyone deserves to have equal rights, that is why I keep encouraging them not to give up easily and should always keep up this spirit. I also try to give them positive energy by praising their good English. It motivates me to participate in more volunteer teaching every time I saw their cheerful faces as I feel like I have influenced them to think positive and optimistically.

Methods And Approaches
Before playing games or starting an activity in each lesson, our team would usually gave a briefing to the students to let them know the instructions. Our strategy is wish to create a comfortable atmosphere hence we would ask the students to sit in pairs to make them feel they are not having a formal lesson. However, this might lead to a problem that they kept chit-chatting and ignored the class. We then came up with an idea of setting up a scoring system. Marks will be deducted for those who are not paying attention while students who are participating well in class will be rewarded.
The other approach that I used to make them feel relax is to invite them to write on the whiteboard or blackboard. They usually got very excited about that because only teachers are allowed to write on the board during normal school days.
Drawing is another essential method to get the children enjoy the lesson. I would then suggest colour pencils as a perfect prize for those who win a class competition.

Siyuan Commonweal Organization

Seven years ago, a group of student volunteers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University stepped into Qing Yang, a penurious but promising land in Gansu Province, bringing with them a dream that waited to be bred. “Flying the hope, we help with the grassroots education. Never forgetting where all the sweetness came from, we focus on the rural development.” From their simple but sincere words, we can easily feel the passion of the students to help develop the rural area and the education.

It is the passion that enables the small group with only more than ten students develop into an organization named Siyuan Commonweal Organization that have built 7 local libraries in 5 counties of 4 provinces, with 500 volunteer teachers and 2000 students so far.

This is their story:

Summer Vacation Education Support Programme

We gathered together for the same dream of supporting education. We once again headed together towards a new direction, to the rural parts. Every minute is filled with happy memories and touching moments during our teaching time together in Gansu Yigang, Miaoqu, Sancha, Maqu; Henan Xiuwu; Zhejiang Lishui; Chongqing Shiyan. It is really a wonderful thing that we spend time together in those hot summers.

The Education Support Team has had a history of seven years since 2004 when it set up. The growing of the team has full filled the past seven-year-history. Members of the team have left us too many treasures from their experiences every year.

Teaching English is always our main action. We are continuing exploring new zones and trying our best to use various teaching methods. The most important thing is to open children’s eyes and develop their thinking methods. As well as we put our heart in updating the teaching methods so that rural children can have more future pathways under our education support. There are about 800 students in a total of 16 classes who participate in our team and some of them even come the whole way along from Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. We have given a total of 1764 hours of teaching period. In addition, the English teaching period is up to 977 hours, the main courses teaching period is up to 425 hours and the activity period is up to 296 hours. There is a total of 88 hours of discussion competitions, reading competitions, drama competitions and so on. Each student has received 27.5 hours of teaching period in average.

Our motivation is children’s dreams of their wonderful future and their eager of knowledge. The Education Support Programme is going on and on with our promise which is we would not give up in any chances to improve the rural education condition. These new starting points are all setting under our real thoughts of helping children in the rural parts.

Library Programme

It is a really big problem for most of the rural children that they are lack of books. They do not have many chances to read books. Only several extra-curricular books or magazines can be passed around among students an entire semester. However, there are books about different areas and even some of the very old ones can be through away or sales as waste paper for us. Have you ever considered that some of them might help the rural children to get to know the world outside and open their eyes or even make them gain the ability to change their lives?

The main point of our Siyuan Books Programme is books. Books will be shipped to the places which is lack of books with informs of the service location. We hope that Siyuan libraries will be built with collaboration in the places which is really lack of books under our efforts and various reading activities will be held within the libraries. This is done for children and set up a relationship for them to education. Meanwhile, it is also done for developing children’s reading habits.

Sponsored by British BP Company and Eaton Company, we have built Siyuan libraries for schools in Sancha, Miaoqu, Xiuwu, Baihelin since 2007. 3 communities, 19 schools, 2 libraries, 2 publishing companies and many kind individuals have donated thousands of books to Siyuan libraries these few years. We conduct surveys at these libraries during the teaching period in each summer holiday to get to know how well do they run. At the same time, we organise many fun activities which are based on reading. Such as extracting good words and sentences, sharing a good book, and reciting competition. We aim to create a curious atmosphere among students.

Images from http://siyuan.sjtu.edu.cn