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H2O Series: Green Island (Mr Philip Tse)

10/15/2019

Text and photos by Mr Philip Tse

Last year, my family and I spent over two weeks in Australia during the summer holiday. For five of those nights, we stayed on an island called the Green Island, which is a beautiful 6000-year-old coral cay located in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. (Q1: Do you know how a coral cay was formed?)

As you can see in the photos above, the weather was fantastic! We expected the water to be clean and clear but its purity simply left us dumbfounded. The only idea we had at that moment was to claim our snorkelling equipment and jump right into the water!

And that’s exactly what we did! As soon as we were done getting advice, half-heartedly, from the equipment guy, we merged into this natural interactive aquarium. There were all kinds of fish: big solemn-looking ones which liked to keep their distance, and tough little ones which would look right into our eyes in defending their territory. Occasionally, we would meet some starfish, rays, or even sea turtles! The turtles were definitely the superstars and they would draw the attention of literally everyone at the beach. Even the little kids would abandon the sandcastles made in a heartbeat just to catch a glimpse of them! Once there was this super friendly turtle swimming right next to me but unfortunately I could not turn on my camera quick enough. It was such an amazing moment! At the same time, I thought about the sea animals which are forced to live in polluted waters and I was saddened by the thought. (Q2: Which is your favourite sea animal in the Great Barrier Reef?)

There were many other things to do besides snorkelling and sunbathing. Taking a ride on the glass bottom boat allowed us to see even more fascinating sea animals from further off shore. Every evening, staff members would feed the seagulls, which were eagerly anticipating the food and fighting for the best positions. There were also night walks for us to join so that we could get to know more about the unique ecosystem on the island.

My favourite moment during my stay there was the hour I spent all alone at the beach one night, listening to the paddling waves and taking pictures of the stars with just a point-and-shoot camera mounted on a tripod in complete darkness. The marvellous Milky Way reminded me once again how negligible human beings are within this vast universe. We are fortunate enough to have this beautiful planet and we should all protect it. Needless to say, I was inspired by this whole experience on Green Island. (Q3: What have you done to help save the living environment of the sea animals?)

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H2O Series: Hot (But Not That Hot) Springs (Mr Sampras Lee)

9/30/2019

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Text and Photo by Mr Sampras Lee

When we think of bodies of water, our minds are immediately drawn to the major oceans, seas, rivers and lakes of the world. But none of them, in my opinion, compares to the warmth and comfort of one particular type of water body. If you have ever had the pleasure of sitting comfortably in a nice and steamy hot spring, you would know exactly what I’m talking about!

Hot springs, in case you didn’t know, are pools of water that are filled with geothermally heated water that has risen from the Earth’s crust to its surface. This means that many hot springs can be found near areas of volcanic activity. Imagine how hot that must be! So hot, in fact, that some hot springs are measured at almost 100°C! Fortunately, the hot springs that you and I get to enjoy are usually at pleasant temperatures of around 37°C (Question 1: Hmm… Why do you reckon this is such a pleasant temperature for us?).

You may have heard of the many health benefits of soaking in a hot spring, such as the boost of blood circulation, reduction of stress, and relief of pain, to name but a few. It is with those appealing benefits in mind that I visited the hot spring as shown in the picture below (Question 2: Can you guess where in the world it might be?)

Lo and behold! I felt the positive effects of hot springs right away! I could feel my body gradually relax with each passing moment, and my worries drift away – it was such a delightful experience. I even tried out the ‘cold’ spring (around 20°C – freezing!) right next to the hot springs on a local’s recommendation, and although it was quite a shock to my body initially, I felt much more refreshed afterwards because of it (Question 3: Why do you think people hop in the ‘cold’ spring right after soaking in the hot one?).

For those of you that have never tried soaking in a hot spring, make sure it’s on your to-do list for your next holiday! For those of that have tried it before, share with us how you found the experience! Where did you try it? How did it feel? Would you recommend it to your fellow schoolmates? Why or why not?

Looking forward to all your responses! Bye for now ;)

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H2O Series: Sun and Beach Holidays (Dr Lee)

9/21/2019

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Text and Photos by Dr H C Lee

Welcome to our new school year with a brand new school theme of "How Too Obvious (H2O)" which is OBVIOUSLY water-related.

Talking about water, I must share with you my unforgettable summer trip in a gorgeous country where I saw amazing beaches that can hardly be found in Hong Kong. These beaches had very long shorelines and the water was crystal clear! Not a single piece of rubbish was found on the sands which also reflected the high quality of citizenship.

The sands were fine like powder! You would never need to worry about the sands cutting your bare feet! A lot of seagulls like to sit on the sands too! These places give you incredible shots even if you aren't good at photography!

Sunset was particularly amazing here, which is a different place from the first picture. This gave me a peaceful feeling. The sky was so huge and I felt so relaxing and free. What was even better was that there weren't many people. If this place were in Hong Kong, I'm sure there would be lots of swimmers and tourists crowding around the place. But, hang on, if these beaches were so amazingly attractive, why were there so few people?

I also discovered this incredible swimming pool right next to the beach in picture 2. In this angle, the waters seemed to be merged together as one! Would you like to swim in this pool? Or jump down to the beach instead? I prefer playing in the beach to swimming in this pool particularly because I have no idea what those black matters at the bottom of the pool are! What do you think?

A final OBVIOUS question...where did I find these amazing places? Can you name these locations? Tell me what you think about these pictures and do share with us your beach/pool related experience in the comment box below or even ask further questions! Happy swimming!

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When Great Shows Collide - Drama Fiesta 2019

6/25/2019

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It was certainly a moving day seeing all the boys activating every dramatic cell in their bodies performing on stage this morning for our yearly Drama Fiesta.

Both junior and senior sessions showed the brilliantly witty video “Alattin and the Magic Tin” (directed by Ms Angel Leung) and the humourous drama “When Fairy Tales Collide...” performed by our drama team (directed by Mrs Paul, Ms Yau and Ms Cheng). But the most exciting parts to me were the competitions by the P.3 (Mini-dramas) and P.6 (Improved Dramas) students.

For the Mini-drama Competition, each class of P.3 sent out three boys to perform a version of Esio Trot or Magic Finger. And some of them had to do cross-gender performance and they did it so confidently and naturally! The P.6 Improvised Drama contest was particularly impressive. With only 10 minutes to prepare for a scene given on the spot, our boys (5 actors from each P.6 class) gave the audience nothing short of creative, funny, well-designed and language-wise fantastic short dramas on stage. When I was their age, I couldn't do anything near that, let alone doing it in front of hundreds of people.

Another interesting addition to our Fiesta this year was the puppet-making activities in the classrooms. Our creative boys made use of the opportunity to show us what a good puppet should look and act like!

My salute to all the participating boys, English teachers, MCs, parent helpers, other colleagues who helped in the Fiesta and of course, Mrs Lam our Headmistress. Mrs Lam sat through both sessions and gave enormous supports to the Fiesta, and it made a huge difference!

It was a great celebration of English as the year ends. Our shows have once again confirmed that: English IS awesome!

Dr H C Lee

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P.6 English Debaters Win in Grand Finals Match

6/22/2019

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[21 Jun] Our P.6 English debating team went up against Yau Ma Tei Catholic Primary School in one of the Grand Finals of the Hong Kong Secondary Schools Debating Competition (HKSSDC) held at YWPS today. The topic for this debate was “This house believes that parents of children who commit crimes should also be penalised” and YWPS argued the affirmative case.

In the end, YWPS won by one point and Jonathan Ford (6E) was awarded best speaker. His teammates in the finals were his classmates Hanson Fung and Kaiser Wong. Congratulations and thanks must also go to Alex Lam (6C), Reinhold Liu (6C) Nathan Shek (6C) and Julian Chan (6E) for also competing in this team this year. Their debating skills were instrumental in getting us into these finals.

Our other P.6 English debating team will compete next Tuesday in another Grand Final match against St Francis’ Canossian Primary School! We wish this team all the best!

Mr Thomas Ching
Debating Team Coach

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P.6 English Enhancement Class Wraps up...

6/21/2019

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Hope the above video is self-explanatory. It has been very nice teaching the P.6 enhancement group and offering them challenging tasks in a variety of aspects of English. It was also a great chance promoting the artistic side of English though, understandably, it was not particularly easy for boys!

However, after a whole year of training (despite the condition of the humble room), the participants of the English enhancement class have shown very good progress and some of their good works have been chosen and published in ACE – a special journal I produce yearly out of my students' intriguing writings. Below is the version for the enhancement group.

Click to download

The booklet concludes our work over the school year and my respect to these young and brilliant English users who have chosen to study in Ying Wa Primary School. Hope you will enjoy their work and that they will continue to keep up their English standard and appreciate poetry, literature and creative writing after they graduate.

Happy reading!

Dr H C Lee

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Dr Lee Awarded Champion in Writing Contest

6/15/2019

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Dr Lee receiving Champion trophy from Ms Ng, Managing Director (Hong Kong) of Oxford University Press (China) Ltd.

[15 June] I am honoured to have received a champion trophy this morning for Oxford Primary English Writing Competition organized by Oxford University Press.

I joined the teachers' category of which the task was to design an itinerary for a "green" exchange tour. Heavily inspired by Ying Wa Primary School's Singapore tours in these 2 years, I wrote about visiting Singapore with Fairfield Methodist Primary School as a major stop.

My strategy of impressing the judges was perhaps the details I gave and the extra contents I put in. The standard worksheet provided very limited space for creativity but as extra sheets were allowed, I took advantage of that! I think when you craft anything for a contest, a way of success is to be brave to "break new ground"!

See below for my work. Do you want to join this "green" tour?

Dr H C Lee

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Germany Educational Trip - Closure

5/21/2019

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At Goethe University

Thank you for following our Germany Educational Trip 2019. Mrs Lam and I had a great time learning overseas and sharing with you what we had experienced. You may revisit any of our days in Germany here:

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7

As for the answers to the daily questions, here you go:

DAY 1

1. These are love locks. They bear the names of lovers and sometimes a date and people lock them to a bridge with the key thrown away to symbolize “love forever”.

2. It's obvious that these letters are “CLOSED” in reverse. The photo was shot from the inside of a shop. When these tags were flipped, people from outside of the shop could see the word “CLOSED” spelled right to indicate that the shop was not open.

3. This was taken in a restaurant and this publication is indeed a food and drink menu!

DAY 2

1. The number tags are to label the trees so that they can be easily referred to. They are not telling you the age of the trees!

2. This silvery sculpture created by artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt is located on the exterior of the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s building. The artists intend to create the sense of lightness from this object. The surface also creates textured images reflecting the surroundings. It indicates multi-perspectives and provides a contrasts to the traditional building on which it is lying.

3. This question asks for your opinions of the famous “thumb” poem in Germany. There is of course no model answer for this question. I personally think that the piece was fun to read, though it is too dark for a children's verse in today's standard. You may find its English version here and decide for yourselves!

DAY 3

1. For this mysterious figure on the floor, it was part of an exhibition designed by students of Frankfurt International School. Its theme was “Whodunit?” (Who has done it?).

DAY 4

1. These bars across the laboratory were in fact power sockets. They could be pulled down for students to plug in to provide electricity for whatever equipment involved in their science activities.

2. According to the Chemistry teacher of AHF-Elementary School in Detmold, the badminton racquet was used to introduce the special fibre to make it, which could be a good replacement to metal. It was bent to show flexibility. The hour-glass was a timer for experiments. It was to catch attention being hanged down from the broken racquet.

3. For this picture, I asked you to give me a caption. So, there is no fixed or recommended answer! Be creative!

DAY 5

1. This slide which was used by Georg-Müller-School Bielefeld during their presentation was to tell us to rethink about education. It led to questions like why do we teach? What should we teach? How do we prepare students for the real world?...etc

2. The boys had a “pupil” tag because they were learning English vocabulary. The teacher placed a tag on an object it referred to. There were several tags in the classroom not shown in this photo. The children were working on a worksheet on translating German into English at word level.

DAY 6

1. The question asks you to describe the style of buildings I saw in Frankfurt. While there is not a fixed answer, I think the buildings have a uniform and simple design featuring large windows that are lined up closely and tidily on the building.

DAY 7

1. The question asks you to name the sculpture by yourself with explanation. Therefore, no fixed answer. But the real name of this sculpture is “Body of Knowledge”, by Jaume Plensa.

2. Finally, this street bookshelf was part of Frankfurt's reading-promoting scheme known as “Open Bookshelves”. People were encouraged to borrow books there by themselves and donate their own books by shelving them there.

That's all for the Q & A! How many did you get right? Please do not worry if your answers are different from the above. Every brain is unique.

I would like to thank the Direct Subsidy Scheme Schools Council for organizing this Germany Educational Trip. Thanks to Principal Dion Chen and Dr Samuel Cheng for leading the tour. And most importantly, thanks to Mrs Lam for inviting me to join the tour with her. It was an excellent learning opportunity for me personally and a great chance for me to bring what I gain overseas to my students at YWPS.

Final advice: Wherever you go, open your eyes and minds to learn, think and reflect more – the world is your classroom.

Dr H C Lee

Tour participants in a meeting

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Germany Educational Trip - Day 7 (Final)

5/17/2019

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At Goethe University Frankfurt

[17 May] This was the final “working day” of the tour as tomorrow we won't have any visiting activities. After a series of school visits, today we had the opportunity to visit a university. It was Goethe (pronounced as GOOteh) University Frankfurt, which was more than a century old.

According to the international student who brought us around the campus, Goethe University Frankfurt was famous for the subjects of finance and business. While these global subjects are taught in English, other subjects are mainly taught in German. But as the German government funds all university students, it makes studying in Germany very attractive.

Walking between buildings in Goethe University was supposed to be relaxing and refreshing in the morning with the whispering wind, swaying trees and inquisitive birds, only if you didn't mind the bird droppings all around your feet!

The university campus was simple-looking. We visited a few buildings and had some tea time in one of them. We listened to the introduction from the international student and finished the tour at their Psychology Department. The weird thing was, no university staff came out to receive us. They were too afraid of Mrs Lam's “Infinity Shirt” perhaps.

To end the tour we had the fortune to have bought tickets for a concert at the Alte Oper (Frankfurt Opera House). We listened to Shaham & Mälkki with Frankfurt Radio Symphony. The concert had Gil Shaham as the Principal Violinist and Susanna Mälkki as conductor. These professional musicians were flawless!

I was in awe entering such an enormous and beautiful concert hall; I was in awe seeing a house of German-speaking audience with almost no interest in playing with their mobile phones; I was in awe witnessing the self-discipline of the audience who knew when to clap and when not to and the time to leave for intermission without any announcement at all!

People here seem to have developed a respectful culture in attending classical music concerts. My experience tonight was much better than the one I had in the Golden Hall of Vienna which was filled with 70 percent Asian with loud talking noise and mobile phone playing habits. While I might not have totally enjoyed the music tonight, this German experience of attending a concert gave me a great impression. And I think it was a very important lesson to learn, musically and culturally.

I'm closing this journey with two questions for you:

1. This status at Goethe University Frankfurt has a great name and meaning behind. Without further search on the origin of this statue, can you give this art work a name and explain why choosing such a name?

2. I came across this bookshelf at a random street corner in Frankfurt. What was the purpose putting it there?

That's all for my 7-day adventure and travelogues. Please continue to use your imagination and creativity to respond to my writing contents and questions, if you haven't done so. When I'm back next week, I'll discuss with you further (if you are in my class!) and look for high quality comments from you. Of course, I will continue to interact with you online through your comments. In fact, I have replied several.

As said, I will bring back a few tokens of thanks for those who have read my writing with heart and responded with thoughts and diligence. And next time when you travel, please don't forget to be hungry, reflective, and generous in sharing. See you all very soon.

Dr H C Lee

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Germany Educational Trip - Day 6

5/16/2019

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Group photo at King's College Frankfurt

[16 May] I was looking forward to visiting today's school not only because I was assigned to officially write about this school for the post-trip publication for Hong Kong Direct Subsidy Scheme Schools Council (DSSSC), but also that my own secondary school bore the same name – King's College.

My Alma Mater is of course a reputable government school in Hong Kong, not affiliated with this King's College in Frankfurt. And in fact, even though they call themselves “The British School of Frankfurt”, they are not related to the UK government. This is simply a new branch of school under the King's Group, run by a group of British people.

Their Head Teacher Ms Sharp had a very passionate and charming speech introducing to us about the governing body and their achievements in the last 50 years in other countries. But unfortunately her words could not be supported by current evidence in this Frankfurt-based school because they only came into existence in August 2018. The school was designed to have a capacity of 600 students, yet now their current number of students is 40. Their staff said that it would take 5-8 years for them to fill up the remaining places, if it could possibly be done at all. So, we probably came a bit too early today.

Despite of their seemingly unreadiness to become a model school for us to learn from, we had some funny interaction with their young children, whose parents were mainly people staying in Frankfurt for a short term for work. Here, Mrs Lam pranked a boy with dirt! Ha! Just kidding... She was half frightened by the dust on the boy's shirt and what he was holding! Can you believe it? The kids were playing with wheat flour!

Mrs Lam represented the DSSSC to present a gift flag to Ms Sharp, the Head Teacher of King's College Frankfurt. Ms Sharp got emotional when she got hold of the flag. Was the flag that heavy or burning hot? No, she yelled with joy seeing the Chinese characters on the flag. She said they looked stunningly beautiful!

The campus of King's College Frankfurt was not particularly large compared to the other schools we visited in this trip, and their rooms were yet to be fully furnished or decorated. We believed that as they grew, they would be able to enrich their teaching and learning environment for their children. And we sincerely hope that it would happen.

Real learning can sometimes get dirty. I agree with that. Not to mention that most students in this school are below 7. These washing machines had great responsibility to keep students' uniform clean after they have played with mud, paint, and flour.

No fancy buildings, no colourful walls, King's College Frankfurt was still in its developing stage and all plans were waiting to be implemented. The lonely blackboard at a bare corner of the school told us something about the simple layout of the school, as well as their striving for NOT becoming a Christmas-tree-school – over-decorated without much substance. However, the school looked to me “under-decorated” too.

It seemed to be a happy accident for us that we were arranged to visit a school which was not fully prepared for visitors looking for professional exchanges on teaching and learning with solid local examples. Thinking positively, we still saw a new school and appreciated what we were offered, however limited their resources and experience at the present were. But it will be a long way till they have got enough pupils to make the school fully functioning. At this moment, we could only give them our best wishes for their future growth.

Just one question today for those who has an artistic and architectural mind:

1. The above are some common buildings in Frankfurt that we observed. Can you briefly describe this particular German architectural style?

Tomorrow will be our final working day in Germany before leaving for home. We will visit a university. I hope it will give us a satisfying morning. Write you again soon!

Dr H C Lee