Rose Oliver recently took a party of 10 students from Shanghai University to visit Mr Tom Banaszewski and our counterparts in Shanghai American School (SAS) at their campus near East Xujing Road, to take part in the “Newbery Award Reading Project”.
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The get together was our first meeting for the Reading Club Project and gave the middle school students at SAS and Shanghai Uni an opportunity to meet, chat about the current book being read (“Holes”), discuss vocabulary and plot development, and generally just make friends and have a nice time.
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The SAS students are all native English speakers, from a variety of places, including America, England, France, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong among others.
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The SAS students are reading over 100 books awarded the Newbery prize as part of their reading project and Tom Banaszewski contacted Rose to help organize a joint cooperation between SAS students and Shanghai University, in order to give the students from both schools a chance to collaborate on the book project, improve their English and make friends.
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At our visit, the SAS students demonstrated how to use the “LibraryThing” online chat forum, so that the Shanghai Uni students could go online to post questions and comments about the book; before taking them on a tour of the school library, (one of the largest collections of English books in China) and spending time with them reading passages from the book and discussing some aspects from the story.
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The informal and very friendly joint session ended with a group photo, after which the SAS school bus took us all back to the train station.
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It was a lovely visit and a great chance for everyone to make friends and really practice their English skills.
Thanks to Belinda and Tom for arranging everything and for taking such great care of us all and thanks to all the SAS students for making us feel so welcome!
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