What I've done so far (Yi Leo)

During the first lesson, when I knew that we were supposed to create a blog and post all our progress on it, I was quite afraid because I never knew how to blog and how blogging was like. I'm also very bad at technological stuff and I was very worried. However, after posting for a few times, I realised that blogging isn't that hard but doing a good blog is really a challenge. We also looked at a photo of a vulture and a child. When we were told to think of one word to describe the whole picture, alot of words started appearing in my head and I did not know which one i should choose to represent the photo. However, I still ended up choosing hunger as I thought it was the most obvious point in the photo. When we were sharing our words, I was very happy as quite a few of us used hunger, this shows that our group is 👍. After that, we were supposed to take 4 photos that represented "school spirit", "happiness", "fear" and "life" within one week. It was quite a difficult task as our photos are either bad quality or too small. Normally, we just snap photos of interesting things we find wherever we go, but this time, I realised that it is actually quite hard to take a really nice photo with a meaning. For the most recent lesson, I got to know that filtering can actually make a photo nicer and bring out the specific feeling in the photo.

Through these three lessons, I've learnt that we should actually try to mix around with different people when doing group projects instead of just always sticking with that old group of same people for every single project. You might get to see the strengths of other people and can even learn from them. At first, when our teacher started numbering us and arranged us into many various groups after we got into our ideal groups, I wasn't very happy because I was not really familiar with all the people in my group. However, after working with them for about 3 weeks, I realised that they are actually quite awesome people :D, I hope that we can get more bonded and enjoy the OELP trip together! :)

What I have done so far (Zijin)

What I have done so far (Zijin)

In the past three weeks we have created a blog and was preparing for our OELP trip this year to either Taiwan or China. Firstly we we're suppose to write about our previous holidays and how we had spent them.Fortunately I went to China for both June and December holidays,these gave me more sources to write about. Besides writing,we have include pictures to further describe our trips.Our group members also posted their pictures taken in December holiday,this help us to understand each other better as we often know little about how our classmates spend their holidays.Secondly,our task is to take photos which express the feeling of happiness, life,fears and school spirit.So we split up the work. One of our members worked on research of Poverty in Singapore and three others worked together to find the photos. I was the girl who covered her face in the third picture of the previous post because we can hardly find someone who has the facial expression of fear, so in the end we pretend to be fearful and used body language (covering one's face ) to depicts fear. Lastly we need to find a color ,a symbol and picture to depict Chinese New Year,Since this is the year of horse,we decided to use a picture of horse and a symbol which is in the form of Chinese word for Spring (春). One important things that I've learnt is to work with my group members and be active in our discussion as well as to think deeper before answering any question or making any stand XP

Chinese New Year

WEE LIN

COLOUR

Red; happiness and luck :)

SYMBOL

福! A word we would all see everywhere during Chinese New Year. 

IMAGE

This year's animal :))

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WAN YUN

I choose gold as the COLOUR to represent Chinese New Year. Gold symbolizes wealth or money. To me, it means to prosper for the whole year, and not having to worry about money.

I chose this SYMBOL as it can clearly represent this year. This year is 2014, which is the year of horse "马".

I chose red packets, "红包" to represent the IMAGE of Chinese New Year 2014. This is because the best part I like about Chinese New Year, other than seeing relatives I have not seen for a long time, is receiving red packets. Apart from receiving money, red packets also symbolizes blessings and good wishes from the giver.

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Zijin

colour：Green as it marks the beginning of spring when plants started to grow.Moreover one of the purposes of celebrating lunar new year is to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Symbol: the word 春

image of  Chinese New Year is firecrackers as in traditional myth, firecracker was used to scare the monster Nian away from the villages.

What I've done so far (Wee Lin)

Basically for the past 3 lessons, we have learnt quite a few new things. :) 

The first lesson, we were asked to create a blog for our group to post a group photo and individual posts about how we spent our holidays. It was a new experience for me as I never tried out blogging before! 

For the second lesson, we looked at a few photos and tried to figure out the story behind each photo. It was not an easy task although it appears to be. If we look at the same photo from different views, we might have different stories about that particular photo. There's a challenging photo challenge coming up next! We have to take 4 photos that describes the following topics: School spirit, Life, Happiness and Fear. Our group have different opinions about each topic. Some of them find that objects can be used to describe the topic while others find that people in the photo can be used to describe the topic. 

Last week's lesson, we learnt the basics to photography. I learnt something new which was the grids in the camera helps to guide in taking a nice photo. I didn't know that! We also learned that through filters could make the photo look more pleasant. 

So far, I have personally learnt that teamwork is very important. Throughout the whole CID, we will be working with the same people which are our fellow group mates. We need to cooperate together to finish up group posts and other group work. Our group members will give us the motivation to start doing our work. Teamwork is what I have learnt. :)

What I've done so far (Wan Yun)

For CID 2, one of my group members first create a blog and all of us then took a group photo which was the first thing we posted in our blog. Although it appears to be easy, we had a long time choosing which photo to post. This dilemma ended when one of us made a photo college which we then posted. 

Afterwards, my group members and I each shared in the blog about our last holidays. It wasn't too difficult for me as I was lucky that my family and I went overseas which allowed me to share my experiences. I also posted some photos which I took from the trip, allowing my post to be more interesting.

Following that, my group members and I posted one word to describe a photo about African poverty and explained why we chosed that certain word. As we had discussed it in class, this task was quite simple and we soon completed it in no time. We also had to post pictures about poverty in singapore. The difficult part soon arrived. We had to take 4 photos depicting "school spirit", "happiness", "fear" and "life". As we wandered around the school, each of us took many different photos. However, many of mine were not really nice as they were not interesting enough. It then came to my mind that taking photos is very easy, but taking a good photo was not a simple task at all. After walking for quite some time, we decided to stop and look through all our photos. We quickly decided on a few of them which we found the nicest and posted them in this blog after adding captions.

During the last lesson, I have learnt a tip when the teacher was going through my classmates' blog. A photo need not be left plain after taking it, we could enhance the photo's message by editing it, through filtration or adding of words/effects. An example is a photo which is edited to black and white which enhances the message "fear". I will try my best to make use of this tip which will improve the quality of photos. 

Poverty in Singapore

If we compare Singapore with some other less developed countries,we would found that actually there is no poverty in Singapore.As the unsuitable environment that children from such poor families are living in, they will be unlikely to do better than their parents due to their difficulty to access education. This results in them losing many job opportunities during their later adulthood.

As shown by statistics, the number of poor citizens in Singapore has increased by about 10% from 2002 to 2008. This was because Singapore was becoming richer, however the wealth did not spread equitably to all its people. The poor in society were firmly anchored to the bottom while the richest floated with fabulous wealth. As the rich became wealthier, the rises in prices escalated beyond what the rest of the society (especially the poor) can afford. 

Image of a homeless Singaporean woman rummaging the trash bins, hoping to find something that can be made used of to give her a living. Since begging is illegal in Singapore, many homeless Singaporeans will have to rely on picking up cardboards to make a living. This may lead to health problems among the poorer parts of society that includes lower life expectancy.

Photo challenge

a) School Spirit

Jia you RV jia you :) (Credits: RV Photography Club)

b) Happiness

Yay! No tests, no homework!!

c) Fear

Feeling scared....

d) Life

Colourful :))

African Poverty

Vulture and child

Word to describe this picture: Hunger. 

The child was in this state as she was starving and needed food. The vulture was waiting for the child to starve to death so it can feed on it to satisfy its hunger. As both of them are in this plight because they are hungry, we chose the word hunger.

My holidays (Hong Wee)

During the 2 months or so of the holidays, I was away in japan for about 1 1/2 weeks. Upon going to japan, I then realized that it was a place far more industrialized than us. The places I visited was mainly Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Sappro. Tokyo is we'll know for its special snacks as such the tokyo banana, and also the popular tourist attraction, Mount Fuji. It also has many modern skyscrapers, which you can get a bird's eye view of the entire city. I also discovered that Tokyo has many railway lines, which makes moving around the city far more convenient.

Osaka is also one of the most commercialized place in Japan, with also many famous attractions like the Osaka castle, and many other great historical place, which interst many people across the world with their history and culture.

Lastly, Sappro is a place very well-known place for its seafood, and they were also sold at an reasonable price at restaurants. 

In conclusion, I have enjoyed my trip in Japan and hope that I will go there again.

My December holiday (Yi Leo)

During the December holidays last year, I went to an ASEAN Jamboree in Thailand. Jamboree is the name of scout camps with scouts from different countries. I went to the camp with scouts from all over Singapore. We had a really great time together. The camp lasted for 7 days and we had a 2 days post jamboree tour at Pattaya in Thailand

During the camp, we had alot of different activities that bonded us with scouts from other ASEAN countries and they were really fun! We had a 10km hike too and we had some ice cream during the hike. The ice creams they sell there are very special, the put about 5 scoops of ice creams into a coconut shell. There were also rice inside the coconut shell. I think this is very environmentally friendly and it was very tasty too. 

However, I think the worst part of the camp was the toilets. There was only squatting cubicles for girls and there wasnt even a proper bathing cubicle. We had to put our clothes in ziplocs and put them on the wet floor to prevent them from getting soaked and there were alot of insects in the cubicle too. It was a very new experience for me bathing in such a condition.

There was also another thing I learnt from this camp. Never sleep the last one at night xD. Our tent was a 12-men tent, although we had only 11 people, there were only very limited space for each of us because our bags were quite big and we could not place them outside the tent as our belongings will all get wet if it rains.

During the post jamboree tour, we went to pattaya. We stayed in 3 chalets, 1 for the girls and 2 for boys. The girls got the best one of all and we even had a pool table in our house! The last day was the most fun of all, we went to visit a 3D art museum in the morning, visited a temple, went to the floating market for lunch and we went to the beach that was very near where we stayed! We played banana boat and it was really really fun. We had BBQ for our dinner and had karaoke too. After that, we all went back to the girls' house and stayed up almost the whole night. 

The friendships that I have forged in this Jamboree was really irreplaceable and I got to know everyone better too! It was really a very enjoyable and good learning experience for me, if there are more such Jamborees in the future, I will definitely try my best to go for it because it is really very very fun! :D it's really hard to describe 10days in short so I'll just stop here :)

Below are some photos of this memorable trip!❤️

My holidays(Wee Lin)

2013 holidays are almost similar as other years ...
However,my CCA ,Girl Guides, had gave me an enjoyable time during the holidays.
Last year there's 1 thing that I had anticipating for even before the holidays. That was my CCA's ROD(Retirement of Duty)2013 Ceremony! This year's theme is "Éclairer Les Ténèbres" which means " Illuminate the darkness ". Feeling excited.^^

Being a Year 1, our task was to prepare a dance performance for our Y4'13 seniors. Guiders told us that we are not allowed to dance using Kpop music.  I guess the previous batch of students love Kpop a lot. Haha xD So we chose an English song instead. We spend quite a number of days practicing our dance, hoping that we will not embarrass ourselves in front of the seniors on the day itself. Oh ya, we also have to prepare souvenirs for our seniors too. It was quite enjoyable as we bought the souvenirs and decorate them.  I hope the seniors would like it. :)

The day finally arrived! We had our ceremony in the school.  Feeling nervous and excited at the same time. All the levels prepared their dances and gifts, ready to welcome our seniors. I was amazed how the Year 2&3s had planned on decorating the room for the ceremony. There were cards shaped like a padlock with the seniors' name written on it and placed on the strings at the windows. It really resembles the bridge in Paris where people attached padlocks on the bridge. How thoughtful they are! The most wonderful and amazing thing was that they actually made a London Eye and also a swing with poles!:))How did they do that? :o

Awww time flies so fast. The ceremony has come to an end.  But I really enjoyed their ROD ceremony and also hoped that the Y4 seniors would like it. It was a fabulous experience that I will remember! ^^

My holiday (Wan Yun)

My holiday (Wan Yun)

Australia is such a brilliant country; its scenery, weather, animals and all. I am so glad that I went there. I will store the memory in my mind and remember it, forever... 

During the last holidays, my family and I visited perth for 8D7N. We first stayed at a farm and experienced farm life. There were many animals kept at the farm; wooly sheeps, spitting alpaca, noisy chickens, hungry goats, and galloping horses. The wool on the sheeps were pretty thick, and they shook as I rubbed the sheep. The chickens pecked at my hand as I fed them food, and the rooster stood on the fence, crowing away all day long. "Run!" was the only word in the other sheeps' head as I chased them. After all the fun playing with the animals, my family and I went to watch a farm show. The farmer showed the audience how he shaved the wool off the sheep. I realised that shaving the wool off the sheep was not as easy as I expected. The farmer had to rest his waist on a stretchable material to allow him to shave the wool easily. He also had to prevent the sheep from moving around. Afterwards, he demonstrated how the cow is milked. Easy as it looks, it takes practice to perfect the skill. This Farmstay was very exciting. One thing that totally annoys me though are the noisy and irritating flies that keeps buzzing around me. ��

Next, we moved on and went to Mandurah. Although it's extremely rare for a sea gull to be spotted in Singapore, the sea gull is commonly in sight at Mandurah, especially at the beaches which practically seems to be their homes. Speaking of beaches, we did went to one and soaked ourselves in the refreshingly cold waters that made my body shiver. My family and I also managed to catch a beautiful scenery of the sunset. After that, we tried a famous fish and chip dish which was served in colossal portions. Yum yum :) Following that, we went to "Penguin Island", an island that was across the land. Although the name suggests that there should be many penguins, there were hardly any wild penguin to be seen. Instead, there numerous seagulls there. I spotted seagulls looking after their eggs, and baby seagulls covered in brown feathers. As we carried on with our journey, we actually caught sight of a wild penguin hiding under a metal pathway. :) My family and I then climbed up a hill and had a bird's eye view of the island. It was absolutely stunning! (Cold and scary too ��)

Afterwards, we went to the pinnacle desert. Just like its name, it has many pinnacles there. Although the pinnacle desert was scorching hot most of the time, we were fortunate that it wasn't war, when we arrived there. Instead, it was terribly windy and cold. The strong wind blew the sand which struck my legs and even my face. Ouch! It even carried my cap away from my head. Despite the discomfort, my family and I managed to catch the beautiful view of the sunset at the desert. 

On the last day of the trip, we went the perth city. It was very busy. We visited King's park and the science centre. It was very enjoyable. I learnt many things at the science centre, such as the energy need to operate electrical appliances. I also witnessed a machine drawing pictures. Cool! 

Sadly, it was time to leave Australia. Goodbye! From this trip, I learnt many things.  From the Farmstay, my knowledge about farm animals increased vastly. I got to interact and play with the farm animals like I never did before, and experience farm life which is a lot more relaxing. I also witnessed many gorgeous sides of nature, such as the vast sea, the sandy desert and the amazing sunset. This trip has been truly awesome! 

My holiday (Zijin)

My holiday

This year I have been traveling to many places in China,For example Shanxi, Beijing and Guangzhou. Shanxi is near to the central China, Beijing more towards north and Guangzhou is at the bottom of the map.So, it is a quite interesting experience as I get to understand the history behind each city further and how most of the Chinese live.I love history,especially Chinese history. These trips actually widen my horizons and give me a much deeper impression of each city's history and present. More towards the central parts where ancient capitals were built, they are less economically advanced but old building structures and custom were remained and we could actually feel the prosperity it had hundreds and thousands years ago. From ancient poems and books you could image how the city looked like thousand of years ago,how those historical incidents had occurred on this land.I felt like staying in the forbidden city when I was in Beijing,just doesn't want to go home. I even had a thought to work in the forbidden city museum someday.  The trips are really amazing,from June to December, I have also experienced the change in seasons and serious haze in China. First time  participated in ice skate and First time saw the sky turned yellow black in the late morning because of Haze.But I'm still treasure these trips as I have really experienced a lot. 

Group photo :)