Contents
Organizational Updates
School Profile: Xiaochao Primary School
RCEF has a new rural school partner in Yongji, Shanxi Province.
Library and Reading Updates
Spring Brings New Reading Activities
Teachers and students welcome the arrival of fresh books and a new library.
Integrated Practice Class Updates
Sweet Potato Project: Part 2
Students raise their own sweet potato seedlings in preparation for planting season.
Project-Based Learning at Xiaochao Primary School
RCEF helped teachers at Xiaochao develop projects in meteorology and landscaping.
Donor Updates
Recognition of Recent Donors
We warmly thank the donors to RCEF in March 2010
School Profile: Xiaochao Primary School
Above: Xiaochao Primary School is located in a village on the outskirts of Yongji, Shanxi Province.
This school year, RCEF began working with a second rural primary school in Yongji, Shanxi Province. Xiaochao Primary School is a public school that serves around 153 students in six grades. Many of them are “left behind children” whose parents have migrated to cities to work. Most of Xiaochao’s teachers live in the surrounding villages and have taught at the school for a decade or more, earning many county and provincial level teaching awards.
While its test scores consistently rank at the top of the township, Xiaochao wants to add more enriching activities to its curriculum and bolster students’ well-rounded development. RCEF is helping Xiaochao to set up a school library and to design Reading and Integrated Practice classes. You can read about these projects in the articles below. RCEF also organizes conferences and meetings for teachers from Xiaochao and our other program site, Guan Ai Primary School, to share teaching methods and experiences.
Spring Brings New Reading Activities
By Sun Chuanmei, Program Manager
As spring arrived in March, the campus was once again filled with the sound of children reading and sharing stories. This semester, RCEF’s library and reading project began working at a new site—Xiaochao Primary School. From our interviews and observations there last semester, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Xiaochao teachers understand the importance of fostering students’ reading habits. However, like most rural schools, Xiaochao did not have a library and could only ask students to bring their own books from home to share with each other. To increase the number and quality of books available to children at Xiaochao, RCEF applied to the Xinping Foundation in Beijing to donate several hundred books and new bookshelves to Xiaochao. RCEF carefully selected the books to make sure they are different from the ones we had already bought for our other program site, Guan Ai. This way, the two schools can share resources.
Preparing for the New Xiaochao Library
While Xiaochao students waited for their new books to arrive, Guan Ai students from each grade picked out around two hundred books from their school library to share with their counterparts at Xiaochao. 66 Xiaochao students from the third to fifth grades enthusiastically signed up to be student librarians and their teachers and I eventually chose 18 to be in the inaugural class. The first part of their training, spread over three sessions, exposed the children to the proper attitude and responsibilities of a student librarian. We used role-plays, games, and small-group discussions to help them understand what it means to be an outstanding librarian.
Above: Student librarian training at Xiaochao Primary School.
Above: A student librarian writes: “I look forward to the Xiaochao library being a place that everyone in the school likes to go to.”
Setting Up the Xiaochao Library
When the boxes of books arrived in mid-March, we had to organize and shelve them. While this sounds easy, it actually entails a great deal of work: labeling, wrapping, stamping, cataloging, and creating a book list and circulation policy. The new student librarians took part in the entire process, sometimes cooperating in an assembly line and sometimes working independently. Students realized that a lot of work goes into getting a book ready to be borrowed! Wrapping the books in plastic is particularly complicated and takes at least three to five minutes per book. Students paired up to do this task together and I was touched by their concentration. The next stage will be decorating the library. How can we create an atmosphere that is warm, friendly, neat, and comfortable so that everyone will be attracted to come in and read? I look forward to the ideas that the students come up with!
Above: Students wrap new books.
Student Governance Experiment at Guan Ai
Meanwhile, at RCEF’s other program site, Guan Ai Primary School, the student librarianship program has been running for a semester already. Last semester, I saw how much the student librarians liked to come up with their own ideas and implement them. Thus, I suggested that they take over governance of the library this semester. The students, especially the fifth grade girls, were excited by the prospect of managing others and designing reading activities. They decided that there would be a governing committee and that any student in the class could nominate himself or herself as candidates. Ballots would be cast silently and each candidate had to give a three minute speech to garner votes. Guan Ai teacher Ms. Li and I witnessed many amusing scenes as the children dealt with the changing situations and strategized for the outcome they desired, trading for support, or playing the emotional card and shedding tears… It revealed different sides of these children to me. Although the third and fourth grade students were too shy to enter the running, they made their opinions heard. Some expressed their support for candidates with strong confidence and sound reasoning. Fourth grader Ren Chenru sounded like a professional journalist, firing questions at candidates and causing some of them to go bright red!
Unfortunately, the election hasn’t happened yet for several reasons. First, all students need to participate in the discussions, which were quite time-consuming. However it was hard to arrange a suitable time since teachers and students are already quite busy. While it was possible to arrange meetings during the first days of the new semester before the textbooks arrived, students had more and more commitments as the month progressed: One day, it was keyboard lessons; the next day, cleaning duty. When we happened to get everyone together, time would pass too quickly. Once, we were determined to finish the election and postponed going to lunch. This worried the school cooks and they came to knock on the door of the library. Our election was creating problems for other staff members at the school. Furthermore, Guan Ai’s Ms. Li and I were also busy with training new student librarians, organizing new books, and repairing old ones. All this added extra tasks to the children’s already-heavy schedules which included regular cleaning of the library. Slowly, the idea of the election faded away in the face of these practical obstacles. Sometimes, the fifth graders will bring up this topic again, but no one has a solution to the time problem. No one is willing to sacrifice their daily reading period to this and finding another meeting time is very difficult.
Silver Lining: Discussion Skills Improve
Nevertheless, Guan Ai students’ communication skills have improved greatly. They were very lively and excited at a meeting that Ms. Li held with student librarian representatives from each grade. The discussion topic was how to design the curriculum for the student librarian class. Each person came up with a lot of ideas and stated many observations and facts. A consensus was gradually formed on topics for month of April. The decisions will be presented to the other students in class for their approval. Towards the end of meeting, I became solely a note-taker, and I thoroughly enjoyed this role change!
Second Grade Flower Garden
The first unit in the second graders’ language arts textbook is about spring. Their teacher, Ms. Wang, used the daily forty-minute reading period to help students experience spring. First, she found a lot of books to do with spring and read them to the students. Then she asked the students to write their own stories about spring, providing them with relevant words to use in creating their own sentences. Ms. Wang also brought the students to the fields to draw the signs of spring in the environment. She encouraged the students to bring seeds from home to plant so that they can see how spring unfolds. She hopes to guide the children to imagine themselves as seeds budding and growing up and to write down their stories, comparing them to the stories they read in class.
Popular “Pipilu” Book Series
RCEF volunteer Wang Xiaofeng donated a complete set of author Zheng Yuanjie’s 54 books to Guan Ai School. Every day, students came to me asking when the books would be ready to be borrowed. However, since the student librarians were involved in preparing the library this semester, we had to take more time and the library opened a week later than last semester. Within three days, all of the books were lent out. All of the sixth graders and half of the fifth graders were reading them and some students finished a book in two days, trading with each other. By the end of one week, some students told me they had read five or six books already. It seems like conditions are ripe to start a book club for this series!
INTEGRATED PRACTICE CLASS UPDATES
Integrated Practice Class is a mandatory primary school subject which emphasizes hands-on, community-based learning. It helps students learn more about the culture and history of their rural hometowns. Together with local teachers at our two partner schools, RCEF staff members are developing practical methods for teaching this class with the goal of sharing field-tested lesson plans and methods with other schools in the future.
Sweet Potato Project: Part 2
Guan Ai Primary School teachers and RCEF staff chose the sweet potato as the subject of a yearlong interdisciplinary project because it is an important local food and can be explored through hands-on activities and interviews in the community. Below is an update from Guan Ai School Principal Sun Huimiao on the latest phase of the project. She and other teachers facilitated fourth and fifth grade students to research, design, and construct an incubator for raising sweet potato seedlings. Click here to read a summary of the activities in the sweet potato project from last semester.
Spring is the season for raising sweet potato seedlings. There are two local methods for doing this. One way is to dig a hole and keep a fire burning under the seedlings to raise the temperature of the soil. The other way is to ferment manure and firewood to raise the temperature. Guan Ai students chose the latter method. Both methods require building a raised planter to incubate the seedlings. This requires calculating how many bricks are needed and this is related to calculating the area of a rectangle, something that the fifth grade students learned in math class.
Above: Students calculate the dimensions of the incubator.
Above: Students examine the size of the bricks.
As the students worked on the problem, I realized that they didn’t have a solid grasp of the concepts of length, width, and height. If it was not for this real world problem, it might have been difficult for the students to realize their shortcomings. The experience showed teachers the consequence of the gap between textbook knowledge and real life. When working on this problem, they saw how the students maintained a high level of interest throughout the entire one and a half hour class. The next day, the fifth graders found three hundred bricks in the village and Mr. Li, a villager, helped them lay the bricks to build the planter.
Above: Students built an incubator.
Above: The finished incubator.
Sowing the potatoes is a very important step we needed to learn about. A RCEF staff member contacted a farmer with many years experience raising sweet potato seedlings and brought students to interview him at his farm. The farmer told us that it’s not good to use manure to raise seedlings anymore because manure has bacterium that will cause the potatoes to rot. He told us to instead lay straw at the bottom of the planter, cover the straw with dirt, trample it down, and then put the sweet potatoes on top. After watering them, a layer of sand should go on top followed by plastic tarp.
There are three ways to position the potatoes. When there are few potatoes, they can be placed flat in the planter. When there are many, they can be placed vertically. The third way is to lay the potatoes diagonally. This is economical because the bottom third of the potatoes usually don’t sprout seedlings. Guan Ai students decided to use the first method. Now, the students are taking turns managing the planter. Their main tasks are to check the temperature of the soil every day, observe any changes, and protect the planter from harm. Our next step will be to research ways of managing the planter as the seedlings sprout.
Project-Based Learning at Xiaochao Primary School
By Hu Laxian, Teaching and Curriculum Specialist
Meteorology Project
Above: Students visit the Yongji weather bureau.
In October, the fourth and fifth grade students at Xiaochao School began a meteorology project. They went to visit the Weather Bureau of Yongji City and interviewed the staff there. Then the school applied to RCEF to purchase some equipment for the students to set up their own small weather station at the school. Every day, they took measurements and compared their data with that of the Yongji Weather Bureau. After a semester, the students were able create charts that showed the average, highest, and lowest temperatures of fall and winter in Yongji as well as the amount of rainfall. Through this meteorology project, students exercised their skills of observation, cooperation, expression, and math application.
School Garden Project
Above: The landscaping at Xiaochao School was undertaken by students.
In March, Xiaochao began a campus landscaping project. All of the steps were carried out by the students, from choosing the topic to drawing a blueprint, to choosing plants, to planting and managing the trees. Through this activity, students exercised their cooperation skills, design skills and creativity. The students set up the flower terraces in an organized way and chose a mixture of evergreen and deciduous trees. They also chose to plant wisteria trees in the southwest and northeast corners of the flower terrace and placed stone benches on a path underneath that they can use in their free time. Of the more than two hundred schools in Yongji, this is the only school garden that is designed by students instead of professionals. You can tell the difference because here, the garden is open for students to walk into, whereas most schools keep their flower gardens closed off. I am confident that more such hands-on projects will be carried out at Xiaochao with the help of RCEF and its hardworking teachers.
Above: Students work in groups to draw designs of the gardens.
Donor Roll
We are grateful to all the supporters who donated to RCEF in March 2010! (A complete list of donors through the years is available here.)
Bronze Sponsors ($100-$999)
Givology (New York, NY)
Hongzheng Lu (Pittsburgh, PA)
Xi Zhang
Supporting Sponsors (under $99)
Jialan Wang (Cambridge, MA)
Owen Gibbins
Xinyuan Shang (Philadelphia, PA)
Ziqiang Wang (Needham Heights, MA)
The RCEF Newsletter is a monthly publication about the educational initiatives being carried out by RCEF in rural Shanxi Province, China.
Read more about RCEF's mission and main program site Guan Ai Primary School.
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Rochester, NY 14692-0424
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RCEF Annual Report 2008-2009
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From our Website:
Students, Your Teacher Likes You
A veteran teacher at Guan Ai takes great joy in being with her students.
A Letter from Mom and Dad
A teacher puts into words the hopes of his students’migrant worker parents.
Why I Joined Integrated Practice Class
Ms. Xie of Guan Ai School explains why she decided to start teaching this class.
Mr. Pei's Choice
Male teachers are rare in rural elementary schools but Mr. Pei takes pride in his vocation.
Sweet Potato Investigation
A common local food teaches students about local culture and history.
Skits Prepare Students for Community Interviews
RCEF staff used skits to prepare students for a community investigation.
RCEF History Slideshow
Four years ago, RCEF was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. This slideshow marks major milestones in our development.
Dispatches from the Field
A special collection of blog posts gives an up-close-and-personal window into our experiences on the ground in rural China
Past Newsletters
RCEF posts monthly and quarterly newsletters on our website.
Click here to read past issues