Hannah in Hong Kong: English Funfair – Wednesday 10th March & Wednesday 17th March 2010

You may have guessed from the slight lack of blog posts this side of Christmas that things have sort of taken me over this year, and I have sadly neglected writing about all of the things I really want to tell you all about. These few months at school have been the busiest yet and while I am enjoying every second (well almost every second..!) I hope it will start to continue to slow down just enough for me to stop and have a chance to write about some of what has been taking up my time.
A big project has been the two English Funfair days held at the school on two consecutive Wednesdays. It is common in Hong Kong to hold English funfair days as a way to get the students to speak English while playing games in a fun and informal environment. (Ha, I sound like a promotional video for funfairs but that’s sort of what they are!) Whilst in orientation in the summer, we all helped to run one at one of the training schools, however, that was simply being assigned one group of children and helping to run one game with another CNET – organizing your own funfair was quite another ball game!
However, as ever, I was able to tap in to some wonderful resources at Chatteris, who provide both the expertise at farming out funfair resources of all shapes and sizes to all of us to run funfairs throughout the year. Furthermore, my school had held funfairs in previous years and so were quite relaxed (worryingly so I thought) at the prospect.

For those of you who don’t really have a clue what I am talking about, an English Funfair in a nutshell is a day where you set up a number of funfair games (e.g. splat the rat, shooting, archery, bowling etc) and the children come and play. All the games are in English, and the students must speak in English throughout the funfair. The English Ambassador Team (a group of 20 P4 – P6 students who have weekly meetings with me) each ran a game helped by other students, parent helpers and also other teachers from the school. We ran 6 similar sessions, 3 on each day for each year group at the time so we could tailor the questions and the games for differing abilities. All the students had a stamp sheet as an incentive to play as many games as possible and a large number of watching teachers ensured that no child was wandering aimlessly around the hall at any moment! In true Hong Kong style, (and NO thanks to me) it ran completely seamlessly and punctually, with the students forming orderly lines at the beginning, during and even at the end of their sessions to get a prize.
The second day saw my English Ambassadors playing the games instead of running them with their own year group. However, some of the Ambassadors, (either power mad or thoroughly bored with the games) actually came to beg me not to play but to carry on running their games! I would have gladly let them but they were told to play with their year group, however, I turned many a blind eye, when I came across an ambassador on the wrong side of their table telling a group of students how to play their game..

It was a manic manic manic day. There were lost resources, a recalled game due to a health and safety violation (helicopter challenge was replaced swiftly by the somewhat safer ball toss) after one of the school governors almost got hit with one of the flying parts…, lost stamp cards…Michael Cheung in P4 had to be called twice after his stamp card was handed to someone else, and I practically had to pull the ambassadors and helpers away from the crazy dress up stand where they rushed after every session had finished!, but all in all nothing drastically went wrong. I sang many karaoke songs with the students at the beginning and end of each session…the enthusiasm for ‘if you are happy and you know it’ seriously waned at both ends after about the 5th time...but I loved the students getting the rare opportunity to have the freedom to run around with their friends comparing the number of stamps they had. It was so nice to count down with them at the start of each session and see them all run in all directions when we shouted go.

Here are just a few of the many, many photos the school took over the two days...

Helicopter Challenge