Month: December 2016

Students are in the maintream classes with their school buddy, and have experienced different hands-on activities and school clubs, including Chinese stamps, wood work, skein dyeing, Chinese orchestra band, western orchestra band, scouts, biology research and international education. They will buddy up with year 8 classes and join another homestay this week.

On the weekend, they spent time with their homestay families visiting Taipei zoo, various shops, markets, Taipei 101, and tasted authentic Taiwanese food, drinks and dessert. I heard very positive feedback about our students from homestay families too.

Our students look a bit tired but are still in good spirit. The local students welcome them so warmly that they have become a kind of ‘celebrity’ on school campus. Students want to have their signature or photos with them and give them a presents!

All is going well!

A group of seven students, along with Chinese teacher Ms Lin, are spending the first 3 weeks of their summer holiday travelling in Taiwan to improve their understanding of Chinese language and culture.

We arrived safely at Taoyuan Airport in Taiwan after an 11 hour flight and travelled directly to Yonghe Junior High School where we were greeted warmly by the principal, staff and students. They had even made an ACG Strathallan flag for us which they raised alongside their own.

We had an orientation of the school and received our school timetable, and then met our school ‘buddy’ as well as our homestay family buddy. The school provides a free lunch every day and we all enjoyed trying delicious Chinese food. After lunch, we were picked up by each homestay family and had a bit of a rest in the afternoon.

The next morning we attended our year level assembly at 7:30am where we were formally introduced to the school and each of them gave a Chinese speech about ourselves in front of 1000 students. We attended classes that morning with our school buddy and were totally immersed in Chinese language. Our Chinese will definitely improve! The weather is quite comfortable – a bit like autumn in New Zealand. We are all settling quite well and are excited and curious to try different things.