Egg Drop

Grade 6 class 1 with their egg drop containers... and Kynesha!

This is Beckham. He is a really smart little kid and is writing a letter to a student in Sandy's class.

The kid on the left is Harry. He does magic tricks a lot... and with those little glasses, Harry was just an obvious choice for a name.

The one on the right is Will. He is one of my favorites. His English sucks but he is so cute and has a really great personality.

Every week I teach two night classes, for kids that live at school during the week. I teach all of those kids in a regular class too, but then get to have a fun class with them once a week. In those classes, I don't really worry about English vocab or anything structured... simply encouraging them to talk and laugh and have some fun is my motive. I played music one week and we play a lot of games and eat lots of treats:) I love these kids. They are funny and cute and excitable and I have noticed a huge effort lately to try to communicate with me, which is so great, because that is why I am here. They live on the second floor (I live on the fourth)so I see them all the time. Some of them come up to my room for crackers and juice before bed on special days, which is really fun because I can show them pictures and let them glimpse my world a little.

This week, we did an egg drop. Last week they drew pictures in class of something that they would build to protect an egg if they dropped it from the 5th floor of the school. They were so clever and drew parachutes and springs and styrofoam... without knowing any of it in English. This week their job was to bring in the materials to protect their egg and we would build them and drop the eggs. Out of 21 containers in two days, only 7 eggs survived. It was really cool and the kids had a good time. Dyan, Poli and Kynesha came on Thursday to watch and my kids were crazy with energy... crazier than usual, which is hard to believe because they are usually batty.

Creativity is not a tenet of the Chinese education system... The kids don't color without being told what color to use and they don't speak unless they use the script that is given in their book. It was pretty amazing to see what they came up with- especially since they really got the goal of the project. I was so impressed with them and want to do something equally fun and challenging next week... any ideas?