The RCEF Blog 博客

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Recently, 6th grade students at Guan Ai Primary began drafting their first letters to their pen pals. This is the second year this class will exchange letters with students at Trinity School in Menlo Park, California. This year the 6th graders will be writing their letters in English instead of having someone translate for them. [...]

Principal Sun of Guan Ai School and I attended the Second Conference of the Community of Excellent Schools. The Community is a loose network of schools around China that have been inspired by the legendary Dulangkou Middle School and are drastically reforming their schools. Many experts and famous educators made speeches at the conference, but [...]

The challenge: Create a structure capable of supporting weight. The rules: Use only disposable chopsticks and rubber bands. Timeframe: Three class periods (40 minutes each) Awards: Structural Award – the structure can support the most weight Teamwork Award – every group member actively participates in the project Environmentally Friendly Award – the structure uses the [...]

Ever wonder what life is like everyday at a rural boarding school in China? Well, below is the daily schedule at Guan Ai Elementary. When the days start getting darker earlier, the schedule is adjusted slightly so that students wake up a bit later and get ready for bed a bit earlier. The schedule is [...]

If Guan Ai’s 4th Grade class is considered the smartest group of students at the school, then Teacher Sun, their language and science instructor, deserves immense credit for providing her students with a rich, engaging curriculum. Earlier this week I visited a language classroom of another teacher at another school. The lesson consisted of students [...]

This week’s selection from the RCEF bookshelf is Positive Discipline in the Classroom: Developing Mutual Respect, Cooperation and Responsibility in your Classroom by Jane Nelsen, Lynn Lott and Stephen Glenn. With over one million copies of this book in print, Jane Nelsen has created quite a following for her positive discipline strategies. Nelsen and her [...]

Ever since I undertook to assist with physical education class teaching duties, apart from attempting various kinds of new activities, I feel more and more that I ought to use the skills I have learned over the years and pass them onto the children. At the same time, I want to mold a positive physical [...]

Teacher Pei and I have focused on providing the 3rd grade students with a very hands-on science curriculum. The funny thing about the science textbooks in China is that each chapter is filled with pictures and drawings of kids doing science experiments, but never clear instructions on how the teacher should allow his/her students to [...]

The government launched curriculum reforms several years ago. The curriculum reform promotes more student-centered teaching in which students are supposed to play a more active role in learning. Publishers have changed the way textbooks are written to facilitate this. There is less text that directly spells out the knowledge students are supposed to learn, and [...]