It's a small world... and theme park, after all.

A few weeks ago, we took the entire school to Disneyland Hong Kong. It was quite an undertaking, but thankfully, Disney actually has a program set up to accommodate schools. Since I am a subject teacher and not a class teacher, I was assigned to help out with the international branch of P2 (2nd grade).

Here is the entire J2F class, so a teaching assistant and I were responsible for half of them.

As I mentioned Disney has a program for the schoolkids. They assign a leader to groups according to the students age and then take them on a 3-hour program that caters to the kids age group and even some of what they might be learning in school. Here is our fearless leader, Mavis, showing the kids how to turn 2D drawings into animation.

The focus of our session was animation, which I thought was pretty cool. I participated with the kids to make flipbooks and other types of animation. My favorite part was when we got a tutorial on how to draw Mickey Mouse using geometric shapes (not to brag, but mine was the best).

The last stop on our animation tour was a 3D movie in an interactive movie theater that also sprayed water, had giant fans to create wind and vibrating seats. It was pretty cool... but not as cool as these two guys.

"It's a small world after all..." As alluded to in the title, the Disney park here is pretty small, especially compared to Disneyworld in Orlando. Here is a shot of the Thailand exhibit in "It's a small world". BTW, they had to stop the ride because a few of my students were reaching out of the boat and splashing water. You can imagine how happy I was about that.

Hit me with your best shot!
My group at the end of the day... and after we relocated one of our wandering girls. Lovely, huh?

All-in-all, it wasn't a bad day, but I certainly don't want to do it again anytime soon.

Farmers in the dell

A few weeks ago we took some of the students on back-to-back field trips. The first day, we went to an organic farm up near the border with mainland China. I was paired with a third grade class. The farm was really neat and they had different stations where the students could learn about farming and recycling, while getting hands-on experience.

Here are the kids learning how to make recycled paper.

Checking the final results...

At the next station, they learned how to make whole-grain bread... and a mess.

The big dark spots are raisins and the tiny black spots are sesame seeds.

The bread was a little salty and sweet, but I thought it was pretty tasty.

Finally, we put the kids to work doing some manual labor (cue evil laugh). The practiced with hoes and rakes.


I really enjoyed the trip... so much so, I fell asleep on the bus on the way back.