Ame: English Week

The Easter break is finally here! Even though the week was only 4 days, it was one of the longest and busiest week we've had so far. We had all of our classes to prepare, finish correcting a lot of stuff to hand back before the break because when they come back they have their Uniform Tests to do, Maureen was coming to evaluate us and we had to prepare and run a bunch of activities for English Week. Even though it was a lot of work, we had a lot of fun and I think that English Week was definitely a success!

High school teachers on the roof, getting ready for English Week activities

When we first found out that we had to prepare activities for English Week and that it was the week right before the break we wanted to do something fun throughout the week and end it with a bunch of activities all day long on the last day. However, it seems that getting teachers to agree to not give lessons during a whole day is not an easy task here. We wanted to do an "Amazing Race" style day, with a bunch of different activities that the students would need to complete in order to get a clue for the final task. I had this image of what we used to do at my high school at the end of the year: "les olympiades". This was to imitate the Olympics, so the whole school was divided into teams with the names of countries and we would have Olympic style tasks to do (races, disk throwing, jumping, etc.). This was always a fun day at my high school because we didn't have classes, the sec. 3 could interact with the sec. 5, everyone would really get into it and wear the colours of their country and all. At the end of the day, everyone would have made new friends, everyone would go back home with sunburns (sometimes in the shape of your country's flag) but happy. Developing new friendships and building team spirit were the goal of the day and it was always a success. I thought we could tried to do the same thing here. While it wasn't completely a success, it did not completely fail either. We finally ended up doing activities after class, on the rooftop. The students could choose between 4 different activities to do (Pictionnary, Scattergories, Riddles or a "In my suitcase I bring..." type of activity). They had difficulties staying in their teams and they were rushed a lot (Mr. Tong only gave them 10 minutes to try to do all 4 activities), but they seem to enjoy it a lot. We also had English Ambassadors (students from form 4 and 6) to help us who were rewarded with bags of candy. They were also very happy because I don't think that they usually received rewards for helping out as it is part what they must do all the time.

Juanita explaining the riddles

Mr. Tong wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea at first, especially about doing the activities on the roofs and having them running around and everything. But I think that in the end he was very happy with the result. He also asked us to prepare other activities that will also take place on the roof for when we get back. Maybe they will end up continuing the tradition next year!