MICHELLE CHAN

This is my second year in the KGV UNICEF Club. This year I was in charge of our Facebook page to keep the school informed with our club UNICEF Hong Kong’s activities.

Nov. 12 - Nov. 13, 2016

Sept. - Nov. 2016

This is an annual event organized by the KGV Charity Committee in which the school houses compete to knit the most blankets. Each blanket is 6x24 squares, and each square is 40 stitches. Because I am not a strong knitter, I had challenged myself just to beat my record from previous years of 10 squares. However, this year I had only been able to knit 9 squares. Although I’m still glad that this was a large improvement from last year, where I only knitted 6 squared.

On my last square, I actually ran out of orange wool. I used my initiative to use left over red wool from previous years in order to complete the square.

Aug - Dec 2016

This year’s school musical was Guys and Dolls. 

Dec 28 - 31, 2015

This trip was organized in joint with the Hong Kong Rotary Council and multiple Interact Clubs in Hong Kong. Being an overseas activity, there were many challenges I faced, including obtaining legal documents and coordination between teachers, students and parents. One thing that was particularly challenging was finding a last minute replacement when one of our KGV students pulled out of the trip suddenly. 

Feb. - May 2016

This is a youth playwriting course that was free of charge, but I did have to apply and send in a sample of my writing. This experience was a complete challenge for me because I had never tried to properly write a script at all before! Therefore, there were many new skills I learned, such as how to create character, atmosphere, etc. Being a HL Theatre student, I had learned how to interpret these things from other people’s writing and performances but had I had to create these all myself.

Dec 28 - 31, 2015

This activity was a completely new experience for me as I’ve never taught anyone ICT skills before nor have worked closely with refugees. New skills that I’ve developed in this process if more patience, as the collaborative  learning process can be tiresome and may require a lot of perseverance. 

One major obstacle I had to overcome was the language barrier. As majority of our clients did not speak English as their first language, it was a times very difficult for them to communicate with us. It required a lot of patience on both of our parts in order for us to move forward and help our clients develop useful ICT skills.

This year I’ve bee elected the Interact Club President. With this role, my jobs include overseeing all aspects, liasing with Ms. Kadri, Rotarians and other organizations, and responsibility over meeting agendas.

As this a still a very new club at our school, one of the challenges I had been faced with was reforming the club. As a founding board member from last year, I understood that we had not been able to reach our full potential of the club. I also learned the importance of collaborative work, as we didn’t work as a efficient team last year.

This year, I had to initiate more as the new President, but also show more commitment and perseverance in order to motivate the rest of my team. 

March - May 2016

I helped my friends Seya and Thea with their IB Film Project as an actor. For this task, I showed a much perseverance and commitment and it was a long period of time and for long hours at a time as well. 

Additionally, I was able to offer my strength of drama skills as I am a HL Theatre student and they are partially graded on the acting style. However, acting on film was a new skill that I had to learn as I had never been a part of a film before. All the acting I had done previously was for the stage. In the end, I was able to work collaboratively with the team and give a proud performance with the advice and feedback I received. 

March - April 15, 2016

This was an event I helped to initiate on behalf of the CSC, where we help to raise money for the Hong Kong Anti-Cancer Society and UK’s Little Princess Trust. We also collect hair donations for the Little Princess Trust. The first picture shown is of the powerpoint I created to present during assembly and promote our event. In organizing this event, we also had to recognize the ethic choices of our volunteers who were donating hair. Thus we made sure to get their written and verbal consent before any of the donations happened. This also occured when we posting their “before and after” photos on our Facebook page. We made sure not to post any photos or videos without consent. 

With this event, I actually became aware of my own strengths as one to keep order during the actual chaotic event of the hair cutting (we held some actual hair cuttings at school). I was able to help organize our volunteers and help groom their hair and mark where to cut, etc.

March 18, 2016

This event is held monthly but I this was my first time participating. This event is a musical event where students devise a music set list for a small concert for local children. 

January 26 - February 27, 2016

This is another activity that I’ve already participated in the past, were we initiate and plan a birthday part for local children.

One challenge that I had was working with new people, as they were not the same group of people that I had worked with last time and I hadn’t been friends with them at the start of the process. In the end, I was able to work collaboratively with them to produce an event where everyone seemed to have a great time. I also became aware of the global issue of low income families, especially in Hong Kong as the children we provided the party for all were from public housing estates. Even though our budget for the party was very limited, everyone still seemed to have a great time, which taught me that sometimes simplicity was enough!

January 21, 2016

This was our third football match for the KGV Girls team, we won 5 - 0. After winning all three games, this puts us at the top in qualifying for the next round.

From the past few months of training, I have learnt that my strongest position is defence but I need to work on spacing in order to retrieve the ball when my teammates are surrounded towards our end of the pitch. 

Most of my teammates were in the team as well from the years before, but there were three new members from year 7. It was fun to work collaboratively with them and discover their individual strengths together.

Dec. 19, 2015

This was another elderly visit that I attended. There were not many new challenges like I have written about in previous posts of my Elderly Home Visits since I was volunteering at HKSKH, which is the organization I normally work with.

Oct. 19 - Dec. 12, 2015

This party is an annual event that runs at our school. This year was the first year where I had a larger role in planing the event as I was a member of the CSC. I was in charge of the activities. This meant that my team and I had to initiate creative games, organize the materials needed and plan a game timetable (pictured above).

Oct. 19 - Nov. 27, 2015

Here are a few pictures from rehearsals and performances in the Theatre Festival 2015, ‘Maisha’. Our piece is a collaboratively devised piece inspired by ‘Years’ by Bartholomaus Traubeck, “‘Maisha’ attempts to explore and physicalize the journey of life. A journey that is shared by all living creatures conscious or not and yet one which is unique and intensely personal to the traveller.”