The RCEF Blog 博客

I know it sounds like a South Park joke but “Where’s Canada?” was really a question Principal Yang of Guan Ai School posed to a vanful of primary school kids as he drove them back to their villages when school got out last weekend. I was sitting in the front seat and since I studied [...]

Happened to come across this interesting piece when I searched literature for the IM study writing….. and want to share it with you all. It is an academic paper published in Child Study Journal (1999). The title is “Play in the day of Qiaoqiao: A Chinese perspective”. Basically, the researchers depicted a typical day in [...]

On Friday, December 21, the New York RCEF volunteers had a small potluck dinner at Diana Wu’s apartment. Of the guests who attended included Dale Wen (RCEF’s consultant), Weiji Ma, Ting Zhou, Nancy King (VP 2006 alumna), Jean Tsao (Director of Fundraising) and Annie (a prospective RCEF committee volunteer), both of whom had to leave [...]

Holiday greetings have been floating around the RCEF email chain recently. But they’re not all about Christmas. Actually, Zhenzhong reminded us that December 22 was 冬至 （Dong Zhi), a very special day in Chinese culture because it’s “the day with the shortest time of sunshine and the longest night” in the Northern hemisphere. You’re [...]

再得知要办校报这个任务之后，我就和老师们商量，决定将此重任交给最稳重的六年级。于是，从昨天开始，孩子们开始了开创之旅。在我的“威逼利诱”（十分钟的时间想出给所有版块起让我感到最奇怪最好笑的名字）之下，孩子们的小组讨论成果不错，“不笑我跟你急”，“脑子抽筋”，“芝麻开脑门”,“校园互联网”，等等等等版块的名字，连我都感到很惊奇。昨天已经将所有的板块内容划定，今天他们将开始版块设计。之后我会将版面转为电子版，之后打印出来。再让他们画上些装饰，最后复印出来，成为正式报纸。 孩子们已经开始经历了采访、甄选稿件、小组讨论、学习参考其它已有资源、组长会议沟通、排版、简单编辑等等，相信这段经历会对他们的能力有所加强。以后整个六年级将会是关爱学校的校报报社，成为他们所有人的一个看得见摸得着的成果。

Recently we here at IT have been putting in a lot of time “RCEF-itizing” various aspects of our web presence, bringing each separate part into the RCEF whole by dressing them up in RCEF’s distinctive colours (if matte blue and grey can be termed distinctive…).
Here’s what the new gallery looks like (with new Volunteer Program [...]

Question No. 17 on the Committee Volunteer Application is, “How did you hear about RCEF?” Today, we got an application that said, “第一次是从家人口中得知，家人也是从电视台的某个记录片中了解的，当时比较关注创办者的经历，没过多久后就在北师大校园里看到了乡村教育促进会的宣传海报.” That is, the applicant’s parents probably saw the European-born Chinese TV Documentary that featured Wei Ji Ma and then the applicant saw RCEF’s posters around campus. These are probably the colorful and [...]

People often ask, “Where is RCEF located?” and we always have to answer, “Nowhere and everywhere.” RCEF is run “virtually” by a small staff in China with almost 90 volunteers spread between several Chinese provinces and 8 countries. Email, MSN, Skype, Wiki, and now, blogs, are our usual way of communicating. That’s why I’ve [...]

We here at IT have implemented a new subdomain to make it just that little bit easier to get to this blog. The new URL is blog.ruralchina.org.
The old URL of www.ruralchina.org/blog will still work, but it’s an extra four keystrokes! Why would you want to do that?! With all the extra time you’ve now [...]

Fifth grade students in one of our TF program sites – Guan Ai Primary School, in Yongji, Shanxi – drew pictures for their American pen pals. Here’s a picture of one of their colorful and humorous creations. Each students has a Personal English Dictionary to learn English words and sentences that will [...]